Watching the US vs. Sweden World Cup Penalty Kicks yesterday morning was excruciating. No, I am not now, or have I ever been a soccer player. No, I don’t follow the women’s team with the fervor of a 10-year-old Club Team hopeful, either. But I watched my daughter play soccer from the age of 5 to the age of 21, learning in her crib, kicking with her Dad and brother, and soccer savant sports reporter Uncle, a myriad of coaches and other girls who helped her to become a strong and amazing player going in for her third goal as a senior in high school, at the big field at Boston University before tearing her ACL and temporarily breaking her heart in 1,342,487 pieces.
Whether the loss is the proper function of a body part, or a game, the heartbreak of soccer is like a deep open wound someone slowly pours salt into–as in a the whole box of Diamond Crystal. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if one team plays perfectly from the minute they hit the pitch, about to bring it home, if the other team makes a lucky or accidental goal in the last millisecond, dream deferred. It never seems fair, or just. We’ve been taught to believe the better team will get the W. Silly us.
Which means soccer is just like life. (Are you saying to yourself only a few posts ago it was how the weather is like life, and now it’s how soccer is like life? Yup, as it turns out, lots of things seem to be like life!)Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you get smacked across the face so hard your head spins like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist, like that crazy ride in a traveling carnival called The Scrambler, like the big wheel in WHEEL. OF. FORTUNE. You think you know what’s going to happen, but something entirely different shows up. You imagine yourself in one scenario and another barges in like that bossy friend you finally had to cut loose. You imagine you know the ending, but then suddenly you’re back at the beginning. You know you deserve to win from all the back-breaking, head-splitting, diligent and honest, principled and virtuous work you put in, but then you don’t. It’s a shock, a hit, a gut punch. When you could and you should, but you don’t. I guess it teaches us that no matter what we do or think or believe or deserve, we do not always get our much deserved happy ending. And this is why when things do line up, when you do get the Golden Ticket, when the best shows up at your door as planned, you gotta do the gratitude dance for maybe a week or two straight, yelling as loudly as you can and throwing in some Simone Biles moves, too.
It’s important to remember that even when you bring your A game, you don’t always get what you should. It’s a slippery slope, a tricky little lesson in that silly control thing–thinking we have it, when, the unfortunate truth is, you, me, and everybody we know, have very little. I call those losses that bruise you so bad you think you’ll be in bed for a year, or two or three, The Heartbreak of Soccer. It’s what the women’s team just experienced. It’s what Megan Rapinoe will remember as she strolls into retirement, the thing we thought was a sure thing that wasn’t–that one moment when it could have, but it doesn’t.
There is some good that comes from this unfortunate malady of humankind, which is that when we do manage to pick ourselves back up (and out of bed), we notice all we do have (GRATITUDOSITY!) and all the good that went into the climb, and we do what we always do, we start again.
*the gratitude-a-thon 