I grew up in Chicago with basketball coaches and data scientists as my parents—learning to read games like poetry. This isn’t about wins or stats. It’s about the quiet moments after the final buzzer, when a team’s soul outlives its record. Portugal never won the trophy, but they kept showing up—3-3 draws, narrow goal exits, late-stage resilience. I’ve seen it all: the locker room silence, the unspoken rituals, the cold blue monotony of failure that somehow became sacred. This is their story—not mine.