Delicadeza no Engenhão

It couldn’t have been otherwise.

The 21 years in which Botafogo went without winning a single title are one kind of tragedy; one could argue that Sunday’s game was one in the much purer sense, if on a massively smaller scale. First act ends up, second act takes a gut-punching nosedive. Unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time. Aeschylus would have been proud.

What brought it on, of course, was our hubris.

This may be a perfect storm of victim-blaming and magical thinking, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that our collective optimism had somehow altered the atoms of the alvinegro universe. Our ascension felt like a fait accompli. The only question that remained: would it be by 3×0 or 3×1? Trivial details. The Brasileirão could end then and there, for all we cared.

The team came onto the field under a shower of confetti, glitter, and black-and-white balloons. A toothy alvinegro zeppelin did loop-de-loops around the stadium, and Fúria Jovem threatened to shake the east wing into pieces. The speakers leaped to life, blaring a distorted version of – was it? – “The Imperial March.” The black and white army, goose-stepping onto the field; for a split second I saw stormtroopers.

The picture was all wrong. Rather, it was perfectly clear. The overconfident team playing at home, poised to steamroller the opponent in a shower of balloons and shut down the championship right then and there. If it were a Disney movie, we’d officially crossed over from Lovable Misfits to Stuck-Up Rich Kids. Sure, São Paulo is one of the richest clubs in Brazil; I don’t mean that literally. On that Sunday afternoon, in the dramatic arc of the game, we became the Evil Empire, Cobra Kai, and the Hawks all rolled into one.

This is the only explanation that I can give for the spectacular, precipitous slide that we took in the second half, starting with the missed goal by Loco Abreu that a friend assured me (charitably or uncharitably?) that even I could have made. It had nothing to do with our players, or theirs, or Caio Júnior’s coaching. São Paulo came back to tie us because the dramatic sensibilities of the universe demanded it. We needed to be taken down a notch. Or even if we didn’t deserve it, the Greek tragedy was too irresistible. We were a child with a preposterously teetering ice cream cone walking along a gravel road, a piece of buttered toast in midair on its way to the ground. We wanted it too badly, thought we could grasp it in our hands. But everything that is solid will melt into air. Of course skill has to do with it, of course some teams are better than others; but after a certain point in football skill ends and fate begins – the caprice of a ball ricocheting off a goalpost – and then, I do believe, dramatic archetypes hold sway.

My prescription is humility. The possibility of victory, as I see it, is much like delicadeza. It has to be cultivated and not cultivated, held in a dimly lit corner of one’s mind and looked at only once in a while lest it tarnish. In other words: no predicting game results, no uttering the word “win,” and no Imperial Marches. Just silent, stoic support. Magical thinking? Absolutely. That’s not to say that it won’t work.

Alternatively: I blame Justin Bieber.

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

É escritora, tradutora, brasilianista e diretora de pesquisa na Rádio Novelo