The ball moved at the Estadio Azteca on June 11, and the whole stadium came up out of its seats. I was young the first time the television said it, el fútbol nos une, football unites us, and I believed it the way you believe things at that age, without asking.

The weeks before this World Cup gave me every reason to stop believing. Attorneys in four states opened investigations into FIFA’s ticket prices. Fans found their seats waiting in other cities. Border agents turned players and officials away. The three host nations spent the spring trading grievances across the lines on the map they share.

Then Mexico played South Africa, and the noise fell away. All over the world, strangers leaned toward the same screen and held the same breath. Rival shirts shared a row and bought each other beer. Forty-eight nations, billions of people, each one wanting their own country to win, each one bound to every other by the wanting.

Yogi Ramacharaka described the mystery. The secret chamber opens, he wrote, “in response to poetry, music, art, deep religious feeling, or those unaccountable waves of uplift that come to all,” and the soul knows itself at harmony with everything. “The higher the human feeling, the nearer is the conscious realization of the underlying Unity.” The national anthems sung as one are one of those waves. A goal celebration is one of those waves.

When the match starts, people lean in together. For a few weeks the world watches, sings, and celebrates goals. Strangers sit side by side, trade shirts, buy each other beers, and remember they have more in common than not. That’s the point. Football brings us together.