Today is the big day for me, my first World Cup game ever. It’s definitely the biggest soccer game I’ve ever attended, and almost certainly the least I’ve ever cared about the specific outcome. It’s got the most riding on it, and if I was covering it, I’d have to work the hardest to construct any sort of internal narrative about the match itself.

It is, in short, a paradox.

Neither Belgium nor Egypt is one of the true megawatt teams of world soccer. Of the two, Belgium is the most successful at the World Cup, especially since 2014, when their much-ballyhooed “golden generation” started coming through. They’ve reached the quarterfinals once and the semifinals once, which - when combined with two quarterfinal appearances at the European championship - is, generally, about as well as any non-superpower European team could be expected to do.

Egypt is more successful continentally, with a bunch of African Cup of Nations titles, but they are relative World Cup neophytes. This is just the third time they qualified, the fourth time they have taken part, and if they win today it’ll be their first-ever World Cup win.

Egypt has the most famous player, now-former Liverpool winger Mo Salah. Belgium has the most Guys, headlined by former Premier League star Kevin de Bruyne, but all those guys are on the wrong side of 30 now. Egypt’s supporting cast is Manchester City striker Omar Marmoush, plus two dozen guys who all seemingly play for Egyptian giants Al-Ahly; Belgium’s supporting cast members (and honestly probably their main Guys at this point) are a bunch of young bucks who play in the Premier League (Jérémy Doku, Amadou Onana, even the somehow-still-under-30 Youri Tielemans).

Belgium is probably the favorite; Egypt is probably the fan favorite, unless you love mayo on fries, or hate Liverpool.

To write about it this way, to construct some sort of set of storylines, is like missing out on staring at the majesty of Mount Rainier, solely because you’re trying to figure out how many feet tall it is.

People have described this World Cup as the USA hosting four Super Bowls a day, but part of what makes the Super Bowl the Super Bowl is that everything is on the line. And that’s not true of these group stage games, at least until the final day of each group, and even then there’ll be some ambiguity.

Win or lose today between Belgium and Egypt, nobody goes home, and neither team would be too down on their chances of moving on to the knockout round even if they lose 5-0.

It’s not the stadium atmosphere that makes this feel big, unless you’re talking about a game involving one of the host nations. (This is arguably the greatest home advantage the USA has ever had, for example; they’re probably the only national team in the world that regularly plays in front of hostile crowds in their own country.)

But the one thing that does jump off the screen in every one of the games I’ve seen so far, even those in which I didn’t have a rooting interest, is just how emotionally invested every one of the participants is, in a way that is - surprisingly - almost never true in sports.

Call soccer “the beautiful game” all you want, but it kind of doesn’t matter what game is being played, at times like this. You could put almost anything on TV - darts, pickleball, bowling, whatever - and if it is very clearly an event that’s considered the pinnacle, by all the participants involved, that sense of drama and conflict is going to jump right into your living room or mobile device or makeshift outdoor viewing party.

This is the same principle that makes the Olympics so universally popular, despite many of the sports involved being the very definition of niche sports for 47 out of every 48 months. It’s why Little League baseball gets on ESPN and why the Club World Cup last year seemed so soulless, and it’s why one of the highlights of the World Cup so far was Curaçao scoring its first-ever World Cup goal, even though they lost 7-1.

Look at those guys! Look what it means to them! Even guys like Salah, the top foreign-born scorer in Premier League history, the top-scoring African in UEFA Champions League history, a man who won the Champions League and the Premier League and the FA Cup and every trophy that matters for Liverpool, and who I suspect will play today like a man who would trade it all to lift just one trophy with Egypt.

Everywhere in sports, we make an effort to imbue the games with meaning. Sometimes it’s “storylines” for the media coverage; sometimes it’s just meaning for us, the fans. Sometimes the leagues try to pile on the meaning themselves (see: the NBA Cup; anyone who’s ever suggested cash prizes for the winners of the All-Star Game in baseball).

But nothing can ever compete with when the games truly mean something to the participants themselves. And for that, there are few events that can match the World Cup.

See you, as it were, at the stadium. Let’s see what this is like in person.