World Cup season: The only time you can see a Seattleite wearing an American flag shirt and downing a brewski at 7 a.m.
My blog entries may make it seem as though I no longer have a job. Of the last seven days, however, I've worked five of them...I'm just like a normal working person now, instead of a crazy working person. I still have to work today, for example. But first, I woke up at the crack of dawn to go pick up my friend James and drive to the relatively new soccer bar, the Market Arms, in Ballard to meet Greg for some early a.m. World Cuppin'.
The line just to get admitted was ridiculous by 6 a.m. The game didn't start until 7 a.m. Pacific time.
Happily, we all made it in before kickoff. Unhappily, DirecTV cut out for a few minutes shortly thereafter, which very nearly resulted in riots...but happily again, it returned, and a good 20 to 50 minutes after placing our order, we even got some drinkies (the 20) and breakfast sandwiches (the 50) to enjoy with the largely scoreless, albeit fast-paced, fraught-with-tension USA vs. Algeria game.
Bloody Mary, Guinness, or Coffee...take your pick.
All 90 minutes of regulation play passed without a goal; meanwhile, in the England-Slovenia game, England led 1-0. Either Slovenia needed to get a goal in their game, or the US needed a goal in theirs, for the US to advance. Although the US dominated the entire game by far - and had even scored once, earlier on, though the referee called a somewhat questionable off sides and threw the goal out - it took until the four minutes of stoppage time for the US to finally knock one in. It looked like this:
USA scores...finally! Screams, high fives, embraces with strangers all around!
The atmosphere inside was equally celebratory.
After the game, throngs of soccer fans poured out onto the sidewalks in Ballard. Every other car coming through the intersection blared its horn, and the fans erupted into another chorus of screams and cheers.
Long live soccer!
I knew it!
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