The party of the Argentine National Team: sweet days of revenge

We know the feeling of winning once in a while, when most of the time you lose.

Or when what has been lost is, precisely, that symptomatic, decisive and so modest line of the hymn that marked the Championship:

.

Let us agree, however, that this time has been

for a number of reasons.

First, it happened far from everything, in a remote desert on the other side of the world;

and like never before, almost no athlete lives at home.

The return of the heroes, on both occasions, has become

in which no one wants to miss.

We all know the spices of this victory.

More than in the two previous stars, this feat was laborious, with games that lasted for hours and penalties for childbirth.

Contrary to the hand of God, Lionel Scaloni's achievement was a prize for persistence, instilling in us the statistical certainty that

.

The wonder that made the country fall in love is the visual account of how pushing and pulling forward, tired but improving, without giving up, is crowned with success.

But beware:

.

In more ways than one, the mass celebration of soccer has become our carnival.

It is the only celebration that motivates immense population tides, with lay faithful that converge in unison from all points of an immense and poorly communicated country.

Would a similar number march for the Pope's visit?

A riddle for now: many would come out of simple curiosity, many others would be absent with a militant attitude.

What is observable is that it is a mass in a state of pure enjoyment, in which the divisions that antagonize us

and the differences between the fan and the happy family, the professional protesters and the barrabrava are dissolved.

Only there can we call ourselves

without any ambiguity, without the mistrust that party politics has instigated in us, with its extortionate use of that word.

During the last dictatorship, the '78 World Cup film was titled

.

Half the sporting pleasure lies in the fact that it always, as a fact or a promise, offers retaliation.

It puts into action and amplifies to euphoria that primal impulse to beat another.

Each Argentine Cup, therefore, presupposes the added pleasure of having defeated the kings of carnival, that Brazil that for decades dominated the universal fantasy of the beautiful game, and whose historical hero, Pelé, was "eclipsed" first by Maradona and later by Lionel Messi.

It is the only land where the giant neighbor has lost supremacy as a Latin American power that it has in less symbolic matters.

Among others, it has become the first exporter of meat in the region –the

, who would have imagined it?–.

Is it necessary to list the defeats that the country has patiently wrought on itself in recent decades?

I wouldn't know exactly when to count them, so let's go to the loudest.

Although months ago we memorized the entire squad of La

, with substitutes, its captain comes from Paris, like one of those

planes that nailed the ephemeral exaltations of the Malvinas war.

In the fantasy substratum, each of the athletes is charged with

In other words, in sport the

of the humiliated country is reborn.

Along with cultural production – the only two fields of action in which the country never stops growing and contributes originality to the world-, in sports Argentina continues to be recognized as a reference in a profound and identitary

.

Anywhere on the globe that an Argentine goes today, they will be greeted with the World Cup triumph;

that will be the mirror, what the other will recognize at first sight, going through the complete ignorance of everything that an origin implies.

For four years, outside we can be relatives of Di María and Scaloni, and not synonymous with

, with the

between natural wealth and a

.

Today that triumph seems to justify all the nonsense committed: classes suspended, waiting for those who died that weekend, only buried on Wednesday, having sold the car and quit work to travel to Qatar at the last minute, with a heartbeat, the illusion and the big card placed in the final.

It is this logic that led two million Argentines to try to enter the River stadium, to the need to raise rows of seats to make room for the public in the Santiago del Estero stadium, in the second friendly with Curacao, and It motivated tens of thousands of families to burn significant sums at dollarized prices,

Soccer rises above necessity and reality.

It has the ability to equalize everything, it justifies itself, it is

in absolute terms, because it is an indelible experience, something larger than life and that you will tell many times, while reality it goes another lane, closer to that recent advertisement, in which a bank offers cash credits showing a man who

on the last day of the month.