Will Americans Start to Care About the World Cup Now?

Last Wednesday, my eight-year-old daughter and I biked through a playground and down a long series of strip-mall parking lots, avoiding the gonzo drivers of greater Boston, past a farm and a Girl Scouts camp, to Bentley University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. We were about twenty minutes from her elementary school, on a reconnaissance mission. Traffic cones with signs temporarily forbidding parking lined the road, and a high blue fence, its netting emblazoned with the words ALLEZ LES BLEUS and the insignia of the French national team, the Gallic rooster, alongside the school’s crest lined the edge of the campus. I saw a white security tent inside the main gate and decided to keep riding. Another entrance was a few hundred yards down the road; this one was unguarded. We went in and rode past deserted buildings to a bike rack.