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There is one all-time greatest moment in the history of sports, and it happened in 1954 World Cup. The story goes that with six minutes left in regular time and the scored tied at two, Helmut Der Boss Rahn had received the ball just outside the penalty box. Dodging a defender and driving forward, he managed to get a shot off at the lower left corner of the goal. It whistled past Crosics, into the back of the net securing Germany their first even World Cup trophy. And even though he had been a hero before that, that’s pretty much how he became a legend.
Forty eight years later, a kid named Robert Lewandowski became a neighborhood legend. It was the greatest summer of my life, when he taught me to play football and he became my best friend.
And he got me out of the biggest pickles I’d ever be in.
I moved to the neighborhood two weeks before school let out.
It was the same summer that Germany would finish runner-up in the World Cup, so with something that incredible going on, it should have started off with loads of great things happening for me, but it didn’t. I was from another city, and I didn’t have a single friend in two hundred miles.
It was a lousy way to end up the eighth grade, because I had zip time to make friends before the summer.
And that’s where it all started.