It All Comes Down to This

Perhaps it was the stultifying heat wave that swept through the Mid-Atlantic in early July, making the couch in my air-conditioned living room seem especially inviting, or the depressing malaise of our national politics, or my despondence over tennis demigod Carlos Alcaraz’s absence from the French Open and Wimbledon because of a wrist injury, but the pleasures of this summer’s World Cup—which ended with Spain’s triumph over Argentina—proved more glorious than I anticipated. Part of the joy conjured up by the competition was in witnessing the nerviest of all ways to break a tie, unrivaled in almost any other major sport: the penalty shootout. Tennis has the tie break. Basketball and American football have the overtime period—a mini-game within the larger one. But penalties are an altogether different denouement, one that’s mesmerizing in its brutally administered finality. It may be the closest we come to seeing our sporting idols laid bare. Oxford professor Adam Smyth once compared the format to the epilogue of a Shakespeare play: “It continues the themes of the drama and gives meaning to what has gone before: but it also exists uniquely outside of it.”