Terranova, Thirty year later

My last entry on this blog was 2023, something about Ted Lasso. I only write here when something truly moves me. Today, something did.

Two Sundays ago, I was at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles for a World Cup match: Iran vs. New Zealand. I'd bought the tickets before the draw, so I had no idea who'd be playing. By the time the bracket came out, the world had shifted, we were in the middle of the Iran–US conflict, and there were rumours that Iran might be replaced by another country entirely. For a while I genuinely didn't know if the game would happen.

But it did. And I was there.

SoFi itself deserves its own post, an entire stadium built underground, somehow both massive and intimate. That's a story for my other blog, BTW. This one is about something else.

The moment the Iranian national anthem played, the boos came, almost the entire stadium. And yet, as the match went on, it became obvious that Iran was the crowd favorite. Most of the stadium was cheering for them.

Odd? Not really. People weren't booing the players. They were booing a regime. The players were just there to play a beautiful game, and we were there to watch one  and somewhere in that distinction, something clicked in me.

I felt the floor drop out from under thirty years, and suddenly I was fifteen again, standing in a field in Dronten, Flevoland, at the 18th World Scout Jamboree. Future Is Now — I still remember the slogan. 29,000 scouts, 166 countries. I don't remember much about the actual activities. What I remember is the sensation: being one small part of something enormous, watching fireworks light up a sky full of strangers who somehow weren't strangers, watching the Taiwanese flag fly, something rare even then, rarer now, at almost any international event since.

I still have the badges I traded with other scouts that summer. They're sitting in a storage unit in Vancouver, collecting dust. Thirty-plus years, and I'd never quite felt that particular sensation again.

Until SoFi.

Watery eyes, watching a flag, surrounded by thousands of people who'd never met, all of us caught up in the same eruption of feeling. A human terranova. Whether it's a scout jamboree or a World Cup match, the belief underneath is the same: in humanity, in the beautiful game, in the beautiful, stubborn mission of trying to see past country, race, gender, religion, politics to the thing underneath that we actually share.

Borders don't divide us. Not really. Not in that stadium, not in that field in Flevoland thirty years ago.