I have always loved sports.  Well, not always, but since I was old enough speak the words “Big Ten” and to pick Bobby Knight out of a lineup, sports have been important to me. Despite my broad interest in all things athletic, however, I’ve always had to draw the line somewhere.  And until this week, that line has been soccer.

Like many Americans, it’s not that I don’t understand soccer—it’s just that I don’t care.  It’s a sport for metrosexual European men who are just looking for an excuse to drown themselves in beer and launch the occasional riot.  It isn’t a real sport, like American football or baseball or basketball.  In short, I am simply too patriotic to watch a soccer game, period.

But I had no choice this week, as I finished out my final days in Cyprus before moving on to Jordan.  APOEL, one of the major teams on the island, was playing Copenhagen in what I was assured was “one of the most important games EVER because…” followed by an explanation of something soccer-related that I couldn’t quite get.  It was a slow evening, and my host was dead set on watching it, so I packed away my figurative American flag for the night and agreed to go to a café to watch the game.

I knew that Europeans got excited about soccer (henceforth “football,” for the sake of accuracy), but I never imagined that the whole of Nicosia would drop what they were doing and go out to watch the game.  It took a solid fifteen minutes of us trekking around town in my host’s car in order to find an open table.  (You read that correctly.  We drove around for fifteen minutes looking for a mere THREE CHAIRS in which we could sit.)  We finally ended up at Ivanhoe’s, a moderately English-in-appearance bar, where all eight television screens were showing football, the largest of the sets being dedicated to APOEL-Copenhagen.

In an attempt to retain my American spirit, I settled in with my Coca-Cola and tried to pay close attention to the game.  To be sure, watching football in Europe is a different animal from watching sports in an America.  Simply the way they televise it—no eye-catching graphics, no commentator’s booth, no commercials (it’s true—there wasn’t a single advertisement till the half), and only occasionally a scorebox or time clock—was completely foreign.  The broadcast was entirely in Greek, so I occasionally (okay, constantly) had to pose inquiries to my host, asking what on earth the score was and how many minutes were left.  I also noticed that there were no stray sheep in this herd—no Bear aficionados among Colts fans, if you will.  I found this quite amazing, and I asked my host’s friend—who very kindly tolerated my questions when my host couldn’t handle my inquisitiveness anymore—what he thought might happen if someone wearing Copenhagen gear walked into one of these packed-to-the-brim bars during the game.  He sat thoughtfully for a moment, then succinctly and seriously replied, “It could be quite bad.”  (A few days later, I read an account of some fans in another European city beating a rival fan with a blunt object during a football riot.  So I think “quite bad” sums it up nicely.)

Watching the other fans in the bar was a spectator event in itself.  Aside from one rather uninterested-looking girlfriend, I didn’t see a single eye rove from the screen during the entire game.  I hardly even saw anyone go to the bathroom (an astonishing feat considering the liquor consumption that night).  When APOEL scored, I didn’t have to know Greek to get the message from the fans: they seemed on the verge of euphoric hysteria with every goal.  There was exclaiming, arm-waving, gesturing about, the ordering of celebratory drinks.  You’d think their lives hung in the balance to watch these people rejoice.  (My host assured me, when I asked what the response would be if APOEL lost the game, that “men would cry.”  I’d believe that.)

But what was most alarming was the fact that I was, astonishingly, surprisingly into this game.  I felt as if I were having some sort of out-of-body fan experience as I held my breath through the final goals of the game (which, for the record, APOEL won), then listened to a whole evening of car honking and shouting from excited fans throughout Nicosia.  I was shocked by my complicity in this merry-making.

I thought, as an American, that I could never truly “get” football.  And to some degree, I still believe this is true—I didn’t grow up playing it, watching it, testing positive for it in my blood results like Europeans must.  But there are some things, apparently, that I can understand: that sure sense of doom when the opponent scores; the joy of that last necessary point; the indestructible hope that this game—this half, this single play—is the one that will fortify our luck or turn our fortunes around.  Because I know what it is to take a game seriously.

I just hope Uncle Sam can forgive me for it.