So the final happened. Germany 1, Argentina 0, extra time, Mario Götze knocking a ball out of the air with his chest and then just... side-footing it past Romero like it was a Tuesday training session. 113th minute. I actually yelled loud enough that my downstairs neighbor banged on her ceiling, which, fair, it was almost midnight for her (she's on a totally different schedule than me, works nights, I always forget).
I don't have cable anymore. Cut it back in February when I did the math on what I was actually paying Comcast for versus what I watched, which was mostly just this exact kind of event four times a year. So watching the final meant WatchESPN, which meant borrowing my brother's login because apparently you still need a "TV provider" to authenticate even though the entire point of streaming was supposed to be not needing a cable box. That's the part that gets me. The technology to watch a soccer match on a laptop has existed forever. The part that's broken isn't the video, it's the business logic bolted onto the front of it.
And the stream did what streams do. Right around the 80th minute, real time, not extra time, right when Higuain had that goal called back for offside, my feed just froze on his face mid-celebration for about eleven seconds while the little grey circle spun. I missed the replay angle, missed the linesman's flag, had to get it secondhand from a Twitter timeline that was moving faster than I could actually read it. That's kind of the whole experience of watching big live sports on the internet in 2014 — you're never really watching the event, you're watching the event plus a three-to-five second delay plus however long your buffer decides to punish you for asking too much of it at the worst possible moment.
Pizza situation was its own small disaster. Ordered from the place two blocks over around 2:30, was told 45 minutes, it showed up closer to 90, and the guy delivering it apologized and admitted he'd been watching the match on a phone propped against the register instead of driving. I wasn't even mad. I'd have done the same thing.
Can we talk about the Golden Ball for a second, though, because this is the part that actually annoys me more than any buffering wheel. Messi got it. Best player of the tournament, allegedly, on the team that just lost the final and that he didn't manage to actually score against in the knockout rounds when it counted most. I get that it's partly a career-achievement type award and partly about the group stage, where he was genuinely brilliant, that free kick against Nigeria was filthy. But handing it to a guy on the losing side, over James Rodriguez, who was scoring absurd volleys with his weaker foot for a Colombia team that got bounced in the quarters, feels like the voters picked the name they recognized instead of the tournament they actually watched. James got the Golden Boot at least, six goals, nobody can take that away. Small consolation for Colombia I guess.
Anyway. Germany's first title since reunification, first European team to win a World Cup in the Americas, all that. I'm sure by tomorrow every outlet will have the "how Germany's youth academy overhaul a decade ago finally paid off" piece written, and honestly that's a good story and worth reading, just not from me tonight. Right now I've got a laptop that's still warm from four hours of streaming, a pizza box on the counter, and a neighbor who's probably still annoyed at me. Worth it.
One last thing — if you're going to build a "TV Everywhere" authentication wall in front of a live stream in an era where more and more of us don't have a cable subscription to authenticate with, maybe expect people to route around it, badly, using a sibling's login and a browser tab they're refreshing every ninety seconds. That's not a criticism of Götze's chest control. That's just where we are.