Douglas Campion was traveling from El Paso to Los Angeles with his family to watch the World Cup match between Belgium and Iran. At the beginning of the second half, to his surprise, he noticed that the United States was enthusiastically rooting for a country at war.
Mr Campion was surprised by his own reaction. “This is the power of football. We love football and we were very excited about the game against Iran,” Campion, 50, said in an interview weeks after the game.
His experience is just one example of how the World Cup unfolded in the United States, creating serendipitous interactions and cultural exchanges that will be remembered long after Sunday's final in New Jersey.
The run-up to the Games was overshadowed by concerns about how the world would welcome the country, which has become increasingly inward-looking under the Trump administration.
It didn't take long to find out, as thousands of supporters and the team spread out across 11 cities across the country.
Massachusetts will never forget how Scottish soccer fans took the Boston area by storm. Houston led thousands of Dutch supporters in a march through downtown, dancing to the beat of a Dutch party bus. Passengers on the New York subway watched in awe as the Norwegian introduced the Viking line. Viking Row is a chanting and squatting routine that is the motif of this tournament. And then there was Times Square, where fans of nearly every team gathered to show their patriotism. On the eve of the final, the Argentina national team took over the match.
Weeks after the team's loss, Lawrence, Kansas, is still dressed as a reminder of how the city opened its heart and doors to the Algerian team. The mayor even proposed an annual reunion with Algerian visitors.
A flag donated by an Algerian family in Washington still hangs in the window of the Lady Bird Diner. Cafe owner Meg Hereford said her family was so charmed by Lawrence's enthusiastic welcome that the University of Kansas band even learned the Algerian national anthem, so she had to see it for herself. “They had no plans to come until they saw how Lawrence would react to the Algerian team,” Ms Hereford said on Sunday before the semi-finals began.
Everywhere in Lawrence there are signs of what once was. Major sports stores, which had repeatedly sold out of Algerian products, now only have a few left. The lampposts still celebrate the unlikely love affair between a Midwestern town and an Arabic-speaking North African country.
“That kind of warmth, enthusiasm and human connection attracts people from all over the world. People want more of that, and we crave it,” Ms Hereford said.
Scotland's fondness for Boston was so complete that the mayor took out a full-page newspaper ad thanking the country's soccer fans.
The tournament also allowed the world to see the patchwork of American identities, and allowed Americans to fully embrace those identities. It was a chance for immigrant communities to support not only the countries that welcomed them, but the places that brought them there.
Colombian-Americans, Brazilian-Americans and Ecuadorian-Americans also joined visitors from their ancestral homelands, filling stadiums to capacity as the World Cup broke attendance records. For fans with roots in small countries, the tournament meant even more, providing a rare opportunity for unity.
“We've never had the chance to all be together, but this was magical for us,” said Farouk Jarrah, who immigrated to the United States at age 17, 40 years before his native Jordan qualified for the World Cup. Visa restrictions prevented many fans from Jordan and other Middle Eastern and African countries from attending.
However, the opportunity for Jordanian-Americans to come together helped create a tournament that will be remembered as the Diaspora World Cup. Some, like Helio Gomez, have shed light on new family connections.
Mr. Gomez, 42, was born to Cape Verdean parents and immigrated to the United States about 30 years ago. At a Cape Verde-Saudi Arabia game in Houston in June, he happened to be sitting near a man named Adelito Andrade, who looked a lot like him.
“We started talking and eventually realized we were actually cousins,” he recalled at a viewing party, watching bottom-placed Cape Verde push Argentina to the brink before being eliminated.
Happily, bringing the community together also created some tense moments. There was an undercurrent of anxiety and conflict in every game played by Iran, whose players were mostly confined to Mexico because of the conflict with the United States.
Protests erupted after each Iran match, with groups opposed to the Iranian government taking to the streets to make their feelings known. Fans clashed inside the stadium over which Iranian flag to wave. The strength of that sentiment was such that some members of the diaspora chose to support Iran's opponents as a form of protest.
The tournament's footprint extended far beyond the stadium and downtown fan zone.
One night, the Fort Worth Rodeo was in the middle of the evening show, and right before the bull riding competition, the night's host from the Cowtown Coliseum took the microphone. “Mr. Norway, are you here?'' he asked. Cheers erupted, and the Americans at the stalls joined several Norwegians and began imitating a Viking procession.
Erling Haaland, the hulking Norwegian striker, became popular with the American public not only for his goal-scoring talent but also for his full embrace of American culture. He came home with a slice of Texas and a stuffed raccoon peeking out of his luggage.
It was a tournament where locals embraced the culture of visitors, and visitors enjoyed the best of America. Eating at Waffle House became a strange rite of passage, similar to visiting a big-box store like Walmart, with fans marveling at the enormity of the merchandise on sale.
Jorge Nuñez, a soccer fan from Bolivia who came to Houston to watch the World Cup in July, filmed himself wandering the aisles of the Buc-ees, a cavernous Texas gas station chain that attracts World Cup tourists. “They said this was the biggest gas station in the nation,” he said, considering several purchases. “It’s nothing like what we have.”
For some Americans, too, the World Cup provided a rare kind of cultural immersion.
Lanny Mon, 87, and his wife of 63 years, Sally, 85, have lived in Kansas all their lives, but they don't remember seeing anything like the scene that brought Argentine fans to town on the day of the fan rally in the park. The Mons watched from their car as thousands of fans dressed in the team's powder blue and white streamed by, singing and twirling flags and jerseys above their heads. “I'm disabled and can't go to meetings without a walker, so I found a parking lot to sit and enjoy,” Mong said.
Just down the road, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, dressed in a suit and strapped to a drum, led the Argentine visitors in chants.
The party ends when the winner is crowned on Sunday. But the memories will likely remain.
