Sunday night felt different. After years of waking to bad news, an England football victory arrived like a visitor from another era, one where sports outcomes were still uncertain and surprise was possible.
The setup was bleak enough. Before kickoff, commentators filled airtime discussing Donald Trump, FIFA corruption, and a controversial red card decision involving Folarin Balgun that seemed to vanish for the United States on grounds that remained murky at best. The usual words failed. Unacceptable. Cheaty. Absolutely stinks. None captured it. The fundamental problem was simpler: in a tournament where rules appeared negotiable, especially for the host nation, what did victory even mean anymore?
Going to bed, the math seemed obvious. England would lose. They always do, eventually. And by morning, some new catastrophe would dominate the landscape, as had become routine for a decade running.
That expectation wasn't paranoia. It was learned behavior.
The Brexit referendum in June 2016 was the turning point, the moment when outcomes stopped following any logical pattern. When Trump won five months later, the lesson felt confirmed: collective human decisions, whether cast by individuals or voting publics, were simply going to be wrong. The spirit doesn't recover quickly from that realization.
Before that rupture, disasters felt singular and manageable. A beloved celebrity's death, a scandal toppling a media mogul, even a natural catastrophe could be processed as discrete events. But 2011 had arrived like a test case for systemic collapse. Earthquakes in New Zealand killed 185. Japan's killed nearly 20,000. Somalia faced famine. Norway suffered the Breivik massacre. The cumulative weight demanded explanation, as if all disasters must be secretly connected.
UK riots that same year sparked months of hand-wringing about society's breakdown and a lost generation. Overnight courts handed custodial sentences for stealing bottled water. It looked catastrophic at the time, though it reads differently now. We have clearer reference points for actual breakdown.
Even turn-of-the-millennium anxieties feel quaint in retrospect. The Millennium Dome was the symbol of governmental recklessness, the trophy exhibit of national mismanagement. Nobody could quite articulate why a dome was worse than any other way to mark a thousand years, but the offense was real enough to dominate debate. That was a time when Tony Blair's slow response to a fictional character's false imprisonment on Coronation Street could generate genuine outrage.
The years between then and now weren't innocent exactly. But they preserved the possibility of pretending.
Since then, unrelenting disaster has become the baseline. Sports have evolved from pleasant distraction into something closer to resistance. They remind you that pessimism cannot predict everything, that guessing wrong still happens, that sometimes the outcome defies the odds.
Sunday morning, waking to England's win, felt like proof of that principle. For a few hours, the future was genuinely unknown.
Author James Rodriguez: "It's a reminder we needed more than we'd like to admit, even if the satisfaction won't last."
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