The Evolution of Messi

The day that Lionel Messi made his World Cup début, on June 16, 2006, I was in elementary school. I had never set foot in Argentina, and I didn’t speak a word of Spanish. The game was against a then unified Serbia and Montenegro. Argentina wore dark blue. I knew very little about the country that my grandparents had left behind, in 1964, for the United States—only that on that day, at home in the New York suburbs, I somehow belonged to it.