It’s The Hype That Kills

So what did we learn this time, kids? Other than the cost of accepting gifts from creepy strangers always being much higher than you think, no matter how much you justify accepting the gift as your due, that is.

Well, in the wake of Monday night’s dopeslap in Seattle, in which the USMNT was the face and Belgium the gloved hand, there are so many lessons to absorb, and that’s even after you leaven off the top 35 percent of the vitriol, which is just snark from late-to-the-party nitwits. That’s the first thing, maybe—that when you open the tent to everyone, the quality of the guests necessarily drops. The amount of abuse the USMNT will take as an adjunct to the amount of abuse it took from the allegedly past-their-sell-by-date Belgians will be impressive, and will lead necessarily to a harsher reassessment of soccer in America, and how it is never going to amount to anything, and how you should just buy more beer and wait for training camp.

And for some of you, maybe, that should be the lesson. You came to see what the party was like. It was fun for a while, then it came time to clean the hall and you fled like a rabbit, saying the party sucked anyway. It was just a way for you to kill time until training camp, and good for you, we suppose. You got something out of it, even if it wasn’t anything satisfying.