Same Game, Different Journeys

With all the excitement—and controversy—surrounding the 2026 World Cup, soccer has found its way into more than a few conversations lately.

During one of them, someone asked me why I was so passionate about Morocco’s national team.

It was a fair question.

Until recently, I knew nothing about soccer.

I couldn’t explain a formation or tell you anything about strategy. I didn’t follow players or rankings. I wouldn’t have known what made one team better than another. Soccer simply wasn’t part of my world.

Morocco, of course, was.

From my first trip there, I began noticing boys playing soccer as I traveled through the country.

I saw them in cities, rural towns, and mountain villages, wherever there seemed to be enough open ground for a game. They played in whatever clothes they happened to be wearing, in well-used shoes, kicking balls that had clearly seen plenty of games before that one.

I noticed them because they always seemed to be having such a wonderful time.

They laughed. They joked. They ran after the ball with their friends.

And I kept traveling.

I didn’t attach any particular meaning to what I saw. I wasn’t studying Moroccan soccer culture. I certainly wasn’t contemplating what those games might teach me about life.

They were simply moments I noticed.

And apparently, moments I kept.

But soccer itself still meant nothing to me.

Until the World Cup.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the first match I ever watched was Morocco against Brazil in the opening days of the 2026 World Cup.

I sat down to watch because Morocco was playing. That was reason enough.

But somewhere in that first match, something connected.

I remembered the boys.

Suddenly, the enormous international game I was watching was connected in my mind to all those small games I’d passed along the roads in Morocco.

The stadium was different. The uniforms were different. The stakes were certainly different.

But it was the same game.

And for the first time, I understood something I hadn’t understood as I watched those boys play. Soccer wasn’t simply a sport that happened to be popular in Morocco. It was woven into the life I’d been passing through.

My affection for Morocco’s national team grew from there.

I still can’t give you an intelligent analysis of their formation. I’m unlikely to offer useful commentary on strategy. But when Morocco takes the field, I care.

And somewhere behind those players in their national uniforms are memories of boys playing on patches of ground in Morocco simply because there was a ball, some friends, and enough room to play.

Maybe that’s why those boys stayed with me.

From the little I’ve seen or heard about organized youth soccer in the United States, the experience can look very different.

There can be uniforms and expensive cleats. Practices and games carefully fitted into family calendars. Coaches and leagues and tournaments. Parents driving children from one field to another. Skills to develop. Teams to make. Opportunities to pursue.

None of those things is inherently bad.

A child can have excellent coaching, beautiful equipment, devoted parents, and serious athletic ambitions—and experience tremendous joy playing soccer.

The difference that interests me isn’t really between Morocco and America.

It’s between the game itself and everything we sometimes build around the game.

Those boys I passed in Morocco seemed to need remarkably little for the experience to be complete.

A ball.

Some friends.

A place to play.

Maybe that’s what caught my attention before I had words for it.

Joy can require remarkably little when the experience itself is enough.

I wonder how often we make the things we love more complicated because we believe more will make them better.

We discover something that brings us pleasure, and we begin adding to it.

Better equipment. More knowledge. Higher expectations. Improved techniques. Bigger goals. More efficient systems. Some future outcome that will justify the time we’re spending now.

Sometimes those additions deepen the experience. They help us grow, create, learn, and discover possibilities we wouldn’t otherwise have known.

And sometimes, almost without noticing, the apparatus surrounding the experience becomes bigger than the experience itself.

I recognize this far beyond soccer.

Gardening can become a list of projects.

Creativity can become productivity.

A hobby can become something to master.

Travel can become an itinerary to complete.

A home can become a collection of improvements waiting to be made.

Even rest can become something we try to optimize.

We can become so occupied with making an experience better that we lose sight of what made us love it in the first place.

Maybe that’s part of what Morocco has been teaching me.

Not that less is always better.

Not that ambition is wrong, or beautiful things are unnecessary, or that we should strip our lives down to some prescribed version of simplicity.

Something gentler than that.

Perhaps simply to notice when enough is already here.

The boys I’ve seen in Morocco weren’t trying to teach me that.

They were playing soccer.

They didn’t know an American woman passing by would remember them. They couldn’t have known that one day she’d sit down to watch Morocco play Brazil and suddenly connect their games with the one unfolding on the world’s enormous stage. Or that later, when someone asked why she cared so much about Morocco’s national team, she’d follow the thread backward and finally understand something about why those ordinary scenes had stayed with her.

Their journeys were theirs.

Mine was mine.

Same game.

Totally different journeys.

And perhaps some of the most meaningful things we encounter are like that.

We notice them before we understand why we’re noticing.

We carry them without knowing we’re carrying them.

And sometimes, something happens that allows us to look back and recognize what was there all along.

A ball.

Some friends.

A place to play.

And joy that needed nothing more.