Given everything that’s happened since, it can be hard to remember that there was a widespread fear, maybe even a widespread expectation, that the 1994 World Cup in the USA was going to fail abjectly.

It had been a decade since the country had even had a nationwide professional league, and even that league had been the sort of burn-bright-then-fade-away operation that had been widespread across American sports in the 1970s and 1980s. This was a period in which the ABA, WHA, and USFL had all briefly challenged established leagues, then imploded with varying blast radii; that the NASL had briefly brought Pele craziness to New York, then disappeared, was in keeping with the times.

The 1994 World Cup was FIFA’s attempt to break into the world’s largest commercial market, one that came probably eight years after they originally intended. The 1986 World Cup was originally set to be in Colombia, but when the Colombians bowed out amidst a tournament expansion, the US (and Canada) were among the frontrunners to host the tournament. Many at FIFA wanted the USA to be the replacement, but a combination of incompetence at the U.S. Soccer Federation and an entrenched old guard at FIFA ended up putting the tournament back in Mexico, for the second time in 16 years.

Even by 1994, there was a general sense among certain quarters of the American public (chiefly led by crusty old sportswriters) that holding the soccer World Cup in the USA was approximately equivalent to holding the Cricket World Cup in the USA, that soccer was a game for foreigners played by foreigners and of no importance or interest to any American who was not in some way foreign themselves.

You could sense that FIFA agreed on some level, demonstrated by their scheduling. The vast majority of games began between 12:30pm and 4pm Eastern time, the better to make them late-evening events in Europe, even though this meant things like “Mexico and Ireland played in midafternoon in Orlando in June, which is like scheduling a game on the surface of the sun.”

The fear was that the games would be played in front of empty stadiums. What ended up happening is that the tournament set an attendance record that’s still never been broken; three and a half million people went to a game that summer, with an average attendance of nearly 69,000, mostly because they played a bunch of games at the cavernous Rose Bowl.

For a 12-year-old watching his first soccer games, it was intoxicating.

I was aware that the USA had made the 1990 World Cup, and was certainly more interested in soccer than the average outstate eight-year-old; we even had the enthusiastically-titled NES video game “Goal!”, its gameplay chiefly focused on attempted slide tackles.

(It also had a “Shoot Competition,” in which the player had to try to beat two defenders and score against a defective goalkeeper who would regularly dive out of the way of your shot. You picked one of three players for this mode: Hansen, Roko, or Juarez. I think the important thing to remember that this was definitely NOT Scotland defender Alan Hansen and the center player was definitely NOT Pelé with letter shifts, so just get those thoughts out of your head right now.)

We even had a soccer ball at our house, which had to be one of fewer than five soccer balls in my entire hometown at the time. I can remember pretending to be Paul Caligiuri, trying to score goals under the clothesline in the backyard (Caligiuri was the only player I knew for sure, thanks to him scoring the fateful goal in qualifying against Trinidad and Tobago, which I had seen on the news or on Wide World of Sports or something.)

But, for me, those 1990 World Cup games might as well have taken place underwater at midnight. The games were on ESPN and TNT; I’m not at all certain we even had cable TV in 1990. I didn’t see a single minute of any of the games, and - except for Goal! and occasional backyard soccer pretending - I’m pretty sure I didn’t think about soccer again until 1994.

That 1994 World Cup, though, was front-and-center in my consciousness. Thanks to the soccer-loving folks at Sports Illustrated for Kids, and ESPN and ABC showing all the games (we definitely had cable by then), a nascent pre-teen soccer fan could finally put up his first World Cup wall chart and follow the USA through its attempt to - unlike the 1990 World Cup - not get destroyed.

So I remember being in the basement, watching Eric Wynalda carve up the Swiss from a free kick. (I also remember my dad, who I’m pretty sure was also watching his first soccer match, saying, “Wow, there’s a lot more action than I thought.”) And I remember being in my grandparents’ kitchen in Hopkins, watching on the tiny kitchen TV as the USA somehow beat Colombia. And then, at my other grandparents’ house, watching Brazil’s Leonardo break Tab Ramos’s jaw and get himself sent off, but ten-man Brazil still beating the USA in the knockout round.

Since then, I have never not followed the USA soccer teams. And I promised myself that, someday, I would do the thing that 12-year-old me couldn’t do, and go to the men’s World Cup.

In a different world, I’d have become a die-hard that has traveled the world, following the USA, but life hasn’t worked out that way. For years, I didn’t have near enough money to think about crossing the globe for soccer; then, I got married and had kids, and going to Brazil or Russia or Qatar for soccer was out of the question. And besides, the USA had been in contention to host the tournament again since at least 2018, the selection for which began in 2009; for most of my adulthood, it’s been less of a question of whether the USA would host the tournament, and more of a question of when.

It’s finally happening, and - thanks to my cousin and his family in Seattle, who are too kind to say no to their lunatic relative from the Midwest - I’m finally doing what 12-year-old me wanted to do.

I wish, of course, that the tournament wasn’t getting underway with some of the sourest vibes of any worldwide sporting event in history. FIFA has taken CONCACAF’s price-gouging to a next level, and has focused on extracting every possible dollar from every ticket. The USA government has started a war with a tournament participant and made getting to the USA difficult-to-impossible for fans, and in one case, a referee.

I’m used to these events causing disasters - remember the dueling toilets at the Sochi Olympics? Discovering that the hockey rink was too small at the Milan-Cortina Olympics, just this year? Brazil’s stadiums failing to get completed in time for the 2014 World Cup? - but I had, naively, hoped that the USA and its already-completed infrastructure would avoid all of these pitfalls.

It was, in the end, too much to hope for that a soccer tournament would somehow rise above the murk.

None of which is stopping me from going, of course. I’m utterly fascinated to see what Seattle during the World Cup is like, whether it’s the equivalent of the town hosting five Super Bowls in two weeks, or whether it’s like a run-of-the-mill Seahawks game week - noteworthy, but not all-consuming. I’ll be in town for all four group-stage games that the city is hosting. It currently seems unlikely that I’ll be able to afford to sell all of the body parts I’d need to sell to get a ticket for USA-Australia, which leaves three games: Belgium-Egypt, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Qatar, and Egypt/Iran.

None of them will be showpieces, and the middle one might be in contention for worst game of the tournament, but I don’t really care.

32 years later, the men’s World Cup is back. Sour vibes or no, I couldn’t be more excited.