The World Cup. According to America.

The morning after every World Cup feels oddly quiet.

It’s amazing how quickly you get used to arranging your life around football – and how strange it feels when there is suddenly no match to arrange it around.

Then you start remembering what you’ll miss and somehow you find yourself convinced that the entire world has been waiting for your postmortem on the World Cup.

Ergo …

For me, it begins with Mexico.

Look. Football-loving countries already know what a World Cup feels like. Mexico simply reminded us. Naturally, I began the tournament in my green jersey, cheering for Mexico. (Had Ireland qualified, I would have been in the same color).

By the end, I was still cheering for the country that had reminded everyone that football is a culture before it’s an industry.

For a couple of weeks, Mexico seemed to adopt an unofficial national uniform. Everywhere you looked there were green jerseys – on mechanics, gardeners, waiters, grandmothers, toddlers and at least three dogs I personally witnessed.

Kickoff became a perfectly acceptable reason to postpone almost anything. For ninety minutes at a time, millions of people voluntarily synchronized their emotional well-being.

Grocery carts were abandoned beside television displays. Even the traffic seemed to know kickoff had arrived. Restaurants rearranged themselves around televisions. Televisions faced out toward the street. Giant screens rose in plazas and entire families gathered beneath them to suffer together, which is one of football’s less accurately advertised pleasures.

The remarkable thing wasn’t that the Mexican national team made a fabulous run. It was watching an entire country rearrange itself around football. When Mexico won, people spilled into the streets. When Mexico played, the streets emptied across much of the country.

Officially, there were three host nations. Emotionally, there was one.

And once Mexico had reminded us what football feels like, the tournament itself got on with surprising us.

The favorites mostly gave us what we expected. Mostly. It was everyone else who reminded us why we watch

Players like Cabo Verde’s 40-year-old goalkeeper, Vozinha, clearly unaware that debutants are supposed to be grateful just to be there. Instead, he spent the tournament behaving as though somebody had forgotten to explain the natural order of things. Every impossible save seemed to make him younger, not older. By the end, half the football world had adopted Cabo Verde as its second team. Me included.

Watching a tiny island nation captained by a Dubliner push Argentina to the brink felt exactly like the sort of story the World Cup exists to produce.

Egypt proved, yet again, that football has never promised a happy ending to the better story. They survived the group stage, won a penalty shootout for the ages against Australia, then went two goals up against Argentina and allowed us to believe – perhaps most poignantly, Palestinians watching from the ruins of Gaza.

They came within eleven minutes of one of the greatest World Cup upsets.

Then it disappeared.

At the centre of it was Mohamed Salah, captain, national symbol, and almost certainly playing in his final World Cup. Zico had supplied the joy; Salah carried the heartbreak. Watching him at the end, standing inside everything Egypt had almost achieved, I cried too.

Deeply unfair. Entirely football.

The Iranian team was forced to contend with a different sort of unfairness altogether. Their opponents weren’t just the eleven players in front of them. Before a ball had even been kicked, they were expected to navigate politics, protests, and impossible moral calculations

The Trump administration forced the team to base itself in Mexico and commute across the border for its matches, initially allowing the players to enter the United States only the day before they were expected to play. Several members of the support staff were denied visas altogether.

Commentators judged the footballers and discussed their performance as though the only obstacles had been on the pitch.

It was a disgrace.

But not every heartbreak comes from injustice.

There are some opponents even the greatest can’t beat. Time is one of them.

Watching Luka Modrić somehow still gliding across a football pitch at 40 reminded us that there are endings you can prepare for and endings you can’t. Before he led Croatia into the match against Panama, the cameras found him sitting by himself, apparently lost in thought. Perhaps he was visualising the first tackle. Or maybe he was remembering the grandfather he was named after, killed during the war, and the people he has spoken of never wanting to let down.

I’ve always thought Modrić carries more than the match onto the pitch. He carries memory, grief, country – and somehow still makes football look light.

I have watched Guillermo Ochoa for so long that his final World Cup felt personal. He wasn’t Mexico’s first-choice goalkeeper. He didn’t need to be. At 40, he came on for the final minutes against Czechia, not because the match required him, but because football occasionally understands symbolism. The ovation at the Azteca wasn’t for twelve minutes of goalkeeping. It was for six tournaments, two decades of impossible saves, impossible hair, and a goalkeeper who somehow became part of the mythology of the World Cup itself.

There were the substitutes – “impact players,” they’re called now – spending this tournament living up to their new name right up until Spain’s Ferran Torres decided the World Cup in the 106th minute. A reminder that sometimes the biggest moment belongs to someone who wasn’t even on the pitch for the national anthem.

As for Argentina. Over the course of the tournament, they had become easy to dislike.

As long as Lionel Messi was there, Argentina never felt out of the match. Just one touch away from changing it. Whether you wanted them to or not.

Even if you spent the last month hoping someone – anyone -would finally stop him, it was hard not to feel something watching the greatest player of his generation walk away from what was almost certainly his last World Cup. Football has always had a way of reminding us that greatness, too, has an expiration date.

Finally, there was Spain. Mighty throughout. They deserved that trophy completely. I wanted to be applauding their win. Instead, I found myself watching as the camera stayed on Messi’s face, wondering how many of us had just seen the last page of a story we’d been reading for nearly twenty years.

Everything that matters in World Cup football was already there.

It was already enough.

What wasn’t enough, was leaving it alone.

For the first time, there were mandatory three-minute hydration breaks, midway through every half of every match, regardless of the temperature.

Football now had quarters.

Football doesn’t have quarters.

FIFA said it was about player welfare. Broadcasters discovered two additional advertising breaks. Both things may, of course, be true.

But when a hydration break is required inside an air-conditioned stadium, it is not entirely unreasonable to wonder whether the players are the only people being refreshed.

FIFA has spent so many years teaching us to follow the money it’s difficult not to notice when every interruption seems to arrive with a commercial opportunity attached. Which brings me to the tournament final.

Somewhere along the way FIFA began behaving as though the World Cup has been asking for all these years to become the Super Bowl.

It hasn’t.

It’s never needed halftime shows. Championship rings. Bruce Buffer introducing the final as though two heavyweights were about to fight for the WBC title. It’s never needed cameras that seemed almost as interested in celebrities as centre-forwards.

I know, I know. Football has always been theater, but it’s never needed this much show business.

Even Spain’s trophy celebration became part of the show.

For the uninitiated, there is an unwritten rule that once you’ve handed over the trophy, you quietly disappear from history’s photograph.

The American president appeared not to understand this. He stayed for the trophy lift, and Spain’s defining image became, briefly and inevitably, about him. Of course it did. Just like that time he phoned FIFA to weigh in on a referee’s red-card decision against a US player, because at some point, football acquired a hotline to the White House.

And yet, despite all of this, the beautiful game kept slipping through their fingers.

For ninety minutes, an underdog can still unsettle a giant. A goalkeeper can still become unforgettable. A host nation can still remind the world why football belongs to ordinary people long before it belongs to executives.

The stories we take home are rarely the ones FIFA tries to sell us.

They’re the ones the game creates anyway.

Of course I’ll be back for more.

That’s the peculiar hold international football has over otherwise sensible people. Every tournament convinces us that this one was unique. Then, before we’ve quite packed away our jerseys, we’re already looking ahead to the next one.

The qualifying draw for the Euros is in Belfast this December.

A football city if ever there was one.

Many of us will once again begin arranging our lives around international football.

And I can’t wait.