a little summer fling

with football (see also: soccer)

Given the dual football tournaments this summer — the European Championship and Copa America —, I've been meaning to write about the sport, and more specifically my slight obsession with its tournaments, for weeks now, if only to justify the hours I’ve spent (not wasted) watching people run back and forth across a pitch. I won't say that every time I get somewhere with this essay, I'm distracted by a match, but it’s not not what happened.

I started writing this at 5pm on a Thursday afternoon after my third football match of the day. I'll be so honest with you: they weren't great. That didn’t matter, though, because to my delight, I was not yet done: three hours from then, there was one more match waiting for me. And the day after, there'd be more. The potential for greatness remained.

I felt, for lack of a better word, alive. Luckily for all of us, this is not the first time this has happened — every two to four years, I find myself embroiled in an obsession of my own making. It's unsettling what it can uncover, this business of finding reasons to live.