Fluminense made me cry.

My friend (and future senator or attorney general) A-Train J.R. came back from a European jaunt this summer. A-T is very good at delineating and analogizing. He is an adept establisher of criteria and superlative at devising indicators. If there are two kinds of people in this world, A-T is part of the group that is very good at developing the ways in which we determine whether you belong to one group or another, which is why interacting with him is always a great way to question your assumptions about any number of things.

One of the first things he asked me after he got back was, “Have you ever cried because of sports?” And I knew decisively when I had last done so: June 1990.

Brasil outplayed Argentina for ninety minutes; but Argentina had Maradona, and he need just a few seconds to break loose, shimmy his way past the midfielders, and feed an unmarked Cannigia in the penalty area. In fact, the link above will take you to a 9 minute clip of the actual broadcast I watched that day.

I was in my dad’s old apartment in Humaita. I remember sitting on the couch while tears poured down my face, as the otherwise odious Galvao Bueno traced a deft line from 1966 to the present, reminding the viewers that not since then had Brasil gone home this early in the tournament. Unfortunately the clip above does not include his sign-off, which my friends and I used to imitate. He mistakenly ended it with his network’s tagline for that Cup (Papa essa, Brasil – take [or eat] this one, Brasil.) As I recall, he signed off thusly:

“We never dreamt as brightly as we did in 1982. In 1986, the dream was less lofty, but still real. And in 1990, Brasil bids the tournament farewell in the Round of 16. You are watching the Globo Network. 1990 World Cup. Papa essa, Bra-…” The end.

So Andres said that he heard a surprising number of stories during his trip that involved watching your club lose and crying in a bar after the loss. He said he didn’t think he knew many Americans who could say the same - but in any case we agreed that after a certain age, those stories become less and less likely: I was 12 in 1990. Since then, I have not cried for sports-related reasons – not when we lost in the finals to France in 1998 and again in the 2006 quarterfinals…until last night, when Fluminense turned in one of the most heroic performances I’ve ever seen on the pitch only to fall short in penalties. I was fine for a few minutes, but suddenly found myself sobbing as we shuffled back to The Georgian. I was definitely beyond the point of being consoled, and Ms. Abstract Citizen had never really seen me in that state.

I am now about twelve hours removed from the debacle and I’m not quite at the point of acceptance. I highly doubt a loss by the national team would ever hit me like the one in 1990 did – it’s less personal because for better or worse, there’s a whole nation involved in the fate of the national side. But there are few of us tricolores. Fluminense is deeply personal, painfully specific, and there is simply no platitude that can pierce the uniqueness of the misery. It is my misery, after all, almost tailor-made. There is no next season – this year marks, to my surprise, the sixtieth anniversary of the Libertadores. We have only been eligible for it twice. In sixty years. This is the only time we have made it out of group play. In sixty years. We are not likely to repeat this in my lifetime.

The dull headache never really went away, and it’s now a contagiously beautiful afternoon. Papa essa, Flu-...