On Sunday afternoon, I sat down to watch Cruz Azul, my childhood team, play for the Mexican soccer league title. I longed for the best, but expected the worst. It so happens that, until this weekend, my team suffered from a curse. And not just any curse. In the past 23 years, the team played nine finals and lost them all. When Cruz Azul breaks your heart, it really breaks your heart.
Over the years, Cruz Azul had lost at home and away; against lesser foes and powerful rivals; when expected, and against all odds. In 1999, the team played the final match at home. I was so sure we would win that I invited a dear friend, one of Mexico’s leading literary critics, a man who has read everything and knows everything, to go to the game with me. He told me that he could not go. “When I’m in the stadium, they lose,” he told me. I tried to convince him that magical thinking was absurd. We went to the stadium … and the team lost, with a freakish goal, in overtime. Upon leaving, my friend, a rational man like few others, kicked, enraged, the doors of the houses around the stadium. “I told you I shouldn’t have come!” he shrieked.
In the following years, my friend stayed home, but Cruz Azul kept losing. In 2013, against our most hated rival, we reached the end of the match with a two-goal lead. “Done deal!” the reader will say. “Not so much,” Cruz Azul replied. A couple of years later, one of the team’s owners confessed to me that, with five minutes to play, he had left the box to go down to celebrate. When he came out onto the field, the score was tied, with a last-second goal scored by the rival goalkeeper, who had gone up in an authentic Hail Mary. Then we lost on penalty kicks. In fact, Cruz Azul lost so many times that a new verb emerged in Mexico: “cruzazulear,” to choke, in the most miserable of fashions.
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So, on Sunday I had high hopes that we would finally win, but I was afraid of the umpteenth deja vu. The game, against an aggressive opponent named Santos, made a nervous wreck of me. I had chosen to wear an old shirt that I got from the team’s props manager in 1992, long before soccer shirts were sold in stores. When Santos scored, and history seemed to repeat itself, I went up to my dressing room to change my shirt. So much for the absurdity of magical thinking!
The team needed only a draw to raise the cup, but at the end of halftime we were down. I braced myself for the ritual of defeat. But then something happened. The team raged against the dark and chose the most glorious side of its history — it had been a winning team four decades ago, when I fell in love with it as a child. And on Sunday, for 45 glorious minutes, it was that way again. In a courageous play, an Uruguayan striker by the name of Jonathan Rodríguez became a secular saint and scored the winning goal.
When the referee blew the final whistle at the end, I took the team flag and sobbed. My teenage son, who was on my left, hugged me and said something I was not expecting. “Like a boy,” he described me. He had a point.
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Because, while I saw the beginning of the celebration, other moments came to mind: those afternoons with my father in the stadium, the images of my childhood room full of flags and pictures of my idols, my first blue-and-white ball, the sensation of shaking hands with a professional player for the first time. I thought of all the times that, like so many children, I had dreamed of being a footballer, longing for just one pro match, one game with the boys in blue. And I remembered when, at 18, I entered the Cruz Azul fields for the first time as a reporter, notebook in hand.
Share this articleShareOn Monday morning I woke up with a hint of melancholy. The emotion, this warm heartache, took me by surprise. I wrote to my friend, the literary critic. “I froze,” he told me, remembering the end of the game. Tears finally got him minutes later, when the camera caught Óscar Pérez, known as “El Conejo,” the goalkeeper who had allowed that unusual goal in 1999. “At long last, we will be able to forget that night,” he told me.
That may be, but that didn’t explain my sudden nostalgia. I always thought that a Cruz Azul championship would make me completely euphoric. But it was not like that. There was, of course, a deep joy. But there was also a strange sense of loss. What was gone? I remembered my son’s words. Perhaps, as in those tales in which a ghost leaves once it has found its mission or fulfilled its calling, this long-awaited triumph had freed my final bond with childhood. Or maybe it’s just that, after 23 years of waiting, with relief also comes loss.
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