The Fourth Star

When the neighbor you’ve never once spoken to hangs a German flag from his window, something has shifted in the ambient temperature of the city. When strangers at bus stops break into football anthems and people you know to be completely indifferent to sport are suddenly opinionating about midfield tactics—that’s the World Cup. Every four years, Germany does this thing: it suspends the national irony and allows itself to want something collectively, openly, without embarrassment.

The number at stake in 2010 was four. Germany had won the World Cup three times—1954, 1974, 1990—and the fourth had been just out of reach for two decades. That’s long enough for a whole generation to grow up wanting something they only know from other people’s memories. The campaign to manifest it was earnest in that particular German football way: stars to pin to shirts, postcards to send, a kind of willed telepathy aimed south toward Johannesburg.

What I actually remember about that summer isn’t any of that. It’s the vuvuzelas—bleeding through television sets and bar walls and everything else, an unbroken B-flat drone that turned every match into something between a ritual and a migraine. Germany played beautifully. They dismantled Argentina in the quarterfinals in a way that made you believe. Then Spain arrived in the semis and that was more or less the end of it. Third place. No fourth star. Not yet.

They’d get there eventually—2014, the Maracanã, Mario Götze in extra time. But in 2010 there was something almost right about the not-yet. Some things need a few more years of wanting before they’re ready to arrive.