Argentina Wins - December 18, 2022

By FARHA GUERRERO

My husband told me that an Argentine reporter once said: “La vida es eso que pasa entre Mundial y Mundial, life passes from one World Cup to another.”

If I think about it, at my age, if I am lucky, I will live to see another ten World Cups.

That’s a small number.

And within those ten World Cups, again if I am lucky, I will see our team into the finals, maybe a handful of times, like we have seen Argentina in the last forty-four years.

Just as the World Cup is unpredictable, our lives are equally so. We couldn’t predict the winner in today’s game with France, and nor can we at the next World Cup final.

We also cannot predict what will happen to us in the next four years.

It is this sort of uncertainty of life and the absurd irony of it, that keeps us living — living to see the next World Cup; living to see if our nations reach the finals.

Now even Moroccans dream this dream.

It’s the same absurdity of life that brought my husband one cold November afternoon in Vancouver to a soccer game that I just happened to be playing.

He arrived with his River Plate jersey and black leggings — an Argentine the moment he stepped onto the soccer pitch with his South American style, sensational passes and sharp eye for the game.

If it wasn’t for that innocent ball passed between our feet, we may have never met.

We now owe to childish play, decades of love, laughter and happiness.

And that, if you think about it, is remarkable.

One can only fall in love with an Argentine on the soccer pitch. I certainly did.

And today, I believe, the entire world did too.