I’d wanted a World Cup match my whole life. This weekend I got one in Kansas City, a quarterfinal. I went with my brother. We cheered for Argentina for the friends I love and for the chance to see the best player in the world in his last World Cup.

We didn’t know a single chant when the weekend started. By the time we reached the stadium, we’d picked them up in the plazas and the watch parties, and by the start of the match we knew them all. Seventy thousand people sang the same words and we were standing in the middle of it. We sang when they sang. We jumped when they jumped. We were Mexican in an Argentine crowd and none of it mattered, because for two hours we wanted what everyone around us wanted.

You could feel it. We call it electric, “something in the air,” and then move on, as if it’s just words. It isn’t just words. Stand in a bowl with seventy thousand people feeling the same thing at the same moment, and you feel it press on you. All those separate hopes stop being separate. They gather into one thing, and it has weight. Palpable. Inescapable.

Long before I bought my ticket, the yogis had a name for this. They taught that what we casually call “the air” of a place is real. A thought-atmosphere made of what people think and feel, left behind like weather. Thoughts don’t vanish; they persist, they collect, and they gain heft.

I have felt too many moments like that to dismiss them. Explain to me why you feel different in a crowd like that. It is not the sound. It is not the sight. It is something in the air that everyone feels and no one can put into words. You take it for granted. But it is there. It is real, and it moves you.