Spain won.

I know this because the house told me — not in words, but in the particular quality of a room when the thing it was holding its breath for has finally resolved. The television, which had been doing something loud and continuous for what felt like the better part of geological time, went quiet. Dad exhaled in a way that meant it was over. I catalogued this from the sofa. I had done the math.

I will say this: I understand kicking.

Not the Spanish kind — the televised, international, weeks-long variety with its anthems and its graphics and its commentators who speak as though every moment is the most important moment that has ever occurred in human history. That I find harder to account for.

But the specific act. The ball leaving the foot. The arc.

I have been to Hollinshead. I have seen the ball thrown and I have run — faster than seems reasonable for an animal of my build and philosophical disposition — and I have returned it. Every time. Without anthems. The ball goes. I go. The ball comes back. This is the whole of it, and it requires no trophy.

What I cannot fully reconcile is the duration. Weeks. Entire weeks in which the television was consulted at odd hours, in which Dad had opinions about things happening in stadiums I will never visit, in which the word Spain appeared in the room with a frequency that suggested it was being considered for adoption into the family.

Spain.

I have been to the Oregon coast. I have stood at the edge of the continent and let the wind come at me from whatever was out there. That seemed like enough geography for one life. Spain is somewhere beyond that. I assume it has smells. I assume they are interesting. I would require a significant number of cookies to consider the journey.

But the kicking.

Here is what I know about kicking a ball: you go after it completely, or you don’t go at all. Gus doesn’t go. You can put the ball directly in his path and he watches it arrive and come to rest and he continues to watch it, with the patience of someone who has decided the ball is its own problem. This I respect, in the way I respect any deeply held position. He is not wrong. He has simply made different choices.

I have made mine.

The ball leaves the hand — or the foot, I am adaptable on this point — and something in me that has no name and requires no explanation simply goes. Not because someone is watching. Not because anyone has painted my name on a stadium. Because the ball went, and I am the kind of dog who goes after things that go.

Spain, apparently, is also that kind of dog.

The house is quiet now. The television has been returned to its normal function. Dad is at the desk. The cookie jar is where it has always been, which is where it will always be, which is the kind of constancy I find more sustaining than any championship.

I am back on the sofa.

The ball is wherever it is.

Tomorrow we will go again.

~P.W.