It took me a while to figure out what I was really looking for, on the way to Field*, for Belgium against Egypt. From the moment we parked and started making our way, I was on hyper-alert, looking for… I wasn’t sure what.

*See photo. FIFA would like me to refer to it as Seattle Stadium.

Eventually, I figured it out: I was looking for something that was just… different. Something that would make the World Cup feel bigger than a Mariners game or a Sounders game. (There was a stand that was handing out free bananas, but I’m told that they’re always there, handing out free bananas. Different, but Pacific Northwest different, not World Cup different.)

The journalist in me was looking for angles, for any sign that Seattle was unprepared or that FIFA was mad with power. I was looking for confused Egypt fans, dressed like pharaohs, lost in a light-rail station, or perhaps purple-clad shock troops destroying a booth selling unlicensed paintings of Lionel Messi.

But there was nothing, just the same Helvetica-set temporary wayfinding you’d see at the Olympics, plus helpful volunteers holding signs everywhere you turned. “Any questions?,” I heard a volunteer with a lovely British accent call, in the middle of the light-rail station. The train cost $3, not the price-gouging transportation prices we’d heard of in other cities. Security was a breeze. I didn’t see a single troop the whole day, not one person holding a long gun or dressed for combat. I went to sports after 9/11; this was nothing like those heavily-armed days.

The crowds weren’t blind drunk at 10am or in any way unruly. I heard one trumpet playing, potentially the same one tootling away from an Egypt cheering section later in the day. The only lines were truly life-altering lines to get into the gift shops, hundreds upon hundreds of people waiting in line - patiently! - to pay $45 for a baseball hat. The only crowded areas of the stadium were around the largest TVs, where fans everywhere had come together, as one, to root for Cape Verde to successfully finish off a draw against Spain.

As the Spanish lined up a late corner, the crowd broke into a chant of “DE-FENSE! DE-FENSE!,” as if the Seahawks had the 49ers third-and-eleven in the fourth quarter.

The food offerings were, near as I could tell, the same food offerings that always exist at the stadium. My childlike wonder was matched fully by my childlike lunch: chicken fingers with Bang Bang sauce.

It was, in short, the soccer state fair. There were kids everywhere, families everywhere, people everywhere, just most of them in soccer jerseys. Belgium and Mo Salah (split between Liverpool and Egypt) were by far the two most popular choices; third place might have been a tie between the USA, Mexico, and Arsenal. And I’d like to offer a special shout-out to the most confused person I saw all day, who was wearing a Tampa Bay Buccaneers creamsicle throwback with Bucky Irving’s number.

Water cost $6, pop cost $9. One stand let us keep the caps on our water bottles, one removed them. Seattle was so ready to host this event. CONCACAF should hire whoever planned this to plan all of their events.

Was I disappointed? A little bit. Competence doesn’t make for a good story, least of all from FIFA.

The crowd at the match was probably split into thirds: a third were all-in for Egypt, a third were behind Belgium, and a third were - like me - enthusiastically applauding good plays from both teams, like a goof. I’ve never felt more like I belonged in whatever parallel universe that the people who wrote those “good sportsmanship” blurbs that used to appear in high school sports programs.

It was a surprisingly warm day in Seattle, with temperatures reaching into the mid-80s - normal for the Midwest, but unaccountably warm for the Pacific Northwest. (There was a heat advisory out, which had to confuse any visitors from Egypt, if they opened the weather app on their phones.)

(Random weather note: My friend Jeff Rueter covered the match for The Guardian, but was stuck in the press box, which is an enclosed fishbowl just under the suite level of the stadium. From that vantage point, it’s impossible to see anything but the pitch itself, along with most of the opposing stands. As a result, Jeff had to text me at kickoff to - and I just love this - ask what the actual sky looked like. So, to any Guardian readers who perused your print editions this morning, I helped with the description of the clouds.)

It had become clear to me that what I wanted, above all else, was a 5-4 win for someone, but it wasn’t to be. I celebrated both goals, a thunderous strike from Emam Ashour in the first half to give Egypt the lead, then a crash-the-net Romelo Lukaku answer in the second half for Belgium (it turned out to be an own goal, in the end, not that Lukaku celebrated it any differently).

It was a classic World Cup match, but not a classic, if that makes sense. Egypt were probably the second-best team on the day, but they had the better idea of how they were going to win, with the setup that’s won games for second-best teams forever in soccer: clog the top of their own penalty area, force Belgium wide when they really don’t want to go wide, wait for chances to go forward with limited numbers and hope for a break or a bounce or (in the event) a 20-yard thunderbolt.

The Egyptian crowd was so ready for Salah or Omar Marmoush to take control and produce a moment of magic, but both were quiet, Marmoush getting loose just once and getting clattered just after (or, perhaps, just before) he’d blasted a shot over the bar.

Meanwhile, Belgium seemed afflicted with too many ideas all at once. They played Kevin de Bruyne and Jérémy Doku and Leandro Trossard all as attacking midfielders, with de Bruyne in the center, which meant they had three different players who were attempting to drift into space at the top of the Egyptian box at the same time, three players repeatedly getting sucked into the same pit of quicksand. One of the midfielders, Youri Tielemans or Amadou Onana, would receive the ball from a defender and turn and look up and see three faces looking back, impassively, all standing completely still.

And so Belgium would instead loft a ball toward the penalty area, hoping for a knockdown and two defenders colliding, Three Stooges-style. It didn’t work. It’s why they needed Lukaku, in the second half, just someone to run at the goal and make a defender turn and run toward his own goal, for a change of pace. Lukaku played almost as many minutes for Belgium against Egypt as he did all season for Napoli, but if the Belgians use him to trundle out and blast into a great mass of packed-in defenders, like a wedge-breaker back when that was a thing in American football, they might be able to keep shoving the ball forward enough to get a goal or two.

1-1, while not 5-4, was a fair result. Everyone had a nice, if expensive, day out. The dude in front of us (USA jersey) got drunk enough that we had to ask him to sit down because he’d made himself into a hard-to-understand one-man obstructed view. The fans behind us in the upper deck tried to start the wave, several times; it never really got going.

Our upper corner of the stadium seemed to be a home for many of Egypt’s fans, a flag-draped one of whom that had taken it upon himself to bring a drum and lead the “Masr! Masr! Masr!” chants that are apparently a well-known part of the Egyptian fan experience. The fans seemed enthusiastic about this in the first half, then less and less excited about it in the second half, to the point that it seemed like they’d begun to ignore the drummer.

There were two fans seated right next to where the drummer was hitting the drum, one wearing a Tigres jersey, one wearing a Mexico jersey. You could see that this bothered them, that the fans were no longer chanting, that the fan energy was petering out, that the drummer was increasingly alone.

They tried to help. First, they gave the drummer an empty aluminum beer bottle to hit the drum with. Then, they started standing up and waving their arms, trying to get the fans to notice their drumming compatriot. Then, when the flag-wearing fan briefly left his drumming area, the guy in the Mexico shirt got up, grabbed the drum, and started beating out the cadence himself.

A Mexico fan, trying to lead hundreds of Egyptians in an Arabic-language chant, hoping to inspire their team to beat Belgium… that simply cannot happen anywhere but at the World Cup. That’s different! Maybe that’s what I wanted!