Catch the fever: Euro Cup 2008

In just a few short hours the 3-week long Euro Cup will come to an end and I feel rather sad, which I know in itself is rather sad. I never expected to catch the Cup fever. I figured at least to watch the French team but not each match. I didn’t think that after the first two games I would go the official website and print out the schedule and put it up on the fridge—to the somewhat surprise of my boyfriend…If he didn’t realize he was with an American girl before, well I guess that might of kicked the reality in full effect. I definitely wasn’t planning on deferring social events because of the 20:45 game time each night for 2 weeks straight-- let alone stopping work earlier for the 18:00 games the first week. I tried to invite people over so as not to be a total looser and thus made more salsa and guacamole in those two weeks than I have in six months prior.

Since there is really no other sport in Europe...yes rugby is making more inroads and there is always tennis, but the manic passion of ‘le foot’ takes all of the American sports of baseball, football, and basketball rolled into one—add in the nationalist spirit of counties and I was hooked. Slowly I watched my preferred teams get eliminated. France, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey—who led to my newly coined term “Turk Attack,” because of the team’s unending efforts to twice come back in the very last minutes of the game until their unfortunate defeat by Germany. But one of my teams has defied their Euro Cup bad-luck streak and that is Spain. They have pushed past their malediction and tonight will seek to win their first Euro Cup title since 1964. I somewhat rhetorically asked my boyfriend what we’ll do once the Cup is over and he replied, without much empathy, “we continue to live.” Yes, I guess that is true. But the first couple nights might be hard.