1 week ago
5
ARTICLE AD BOX
When Lionel Messi scores a hat-trick, the world celebrates. Statistics are updated, records are broken, and commentators run out of superlatives to describe a man who transcended the boundaries of sport long ago.
But as I woke up at 6.30 on Wednesday morning to watch Argentina play Algeria, Messi’s latest feat stirred something more intimate than admiration. It reopened a memory. A wound, perhaps. And strangely, an affection that has survived disappointment.Because I remember December 13.I remember the anticipation that had built up over months, almost like waiting for Durga Puja. I remember how an entire city rearranged its life around the possibility of seeing Lionel Messi.
Fans flew in from neighbouring states. Others boarded overnight trains from districts. College students skipped luxuries and saved money for months. Some bought tickets in instalments. And I was one among them, waiting for what felt impossible until suddenly it wasn’t.After years of waking up in the middle of the night to watch him on television, after years of defending Argentina in countless football debates, after tears in 2014 and euphoria in 2022, I would finally see Lionel Messi.
Not on a screen. Not through grainy highlights. But in flesh and blood.Or so I thought.What unfolded instead was perhaps the cruelest kind of disappointment – not absence, but proximity. He was there. And yet, he wasn’t.The GOAT was in the city, and thousands like me who had waited for him could not even catch a glimpse. I saw everyone trying to get closer, until no one could really see him at all. Messi was only metres away but he might as well have been on another continent.There is a peculiar sadness in being denied something that’s within reach. It’s easier to mourn what never came than to process what arrived but remained unseen. And perhaps that is why the memory lingers. What hurt was that a city, and a Messi fan, that had given him so much love for so many years deserved a moment. Just a moment. A wave. A smile. A memory that could be shared with friends and family. Instead, what remains is a sentence I have heard from countless others and one that I, too, carry with me: “I was there.
But I couldn’t see him.”And yet, love has a strange way of surviving disappointment. Because even after all that, when Messi scores, Kolkata rises, like it did at 6.30 on Wednesday morning. Will I forget that the GOAT was once so near, yet remained so far?Not really, not after that landmark disappointment. But then again, every Messi goal, every record and every hat-trick somehow feels personal. It reminds me why I waited in the first place, why I grew up cutting out Messi’s photographs from newspapers and saving them like treasures.
It was my fascination with him that first made me want to understand football beyond goals and scorelines. Somewhere along the way, admiration for a boy from Rosario became a love for the game itself.Perhaps Messi owes Kolkata nothing. But maybe the episode taught me that greatness deserves admiration, but also dignity. When icons visit, they should be celebrated, not consumed. Fans who spend their savings and carry memories for a lifetime deserve better than chaos and disappointment.Messi’s records belong to history, immortalised in numbers and milestones, but this hat-trick belongs, in a small and deeply emotional way, to me too – a fan girl who has loved a boy from Rosario long before he set foot here and waited months to see him only to discover that one could be heartbreakingly close to a dream and still never touch it. Yet, even after December’s disappointment, I woke up before dawn on June 17, proving that love outlives distance, heartbreak and unfulfilled promises.I never stopped loving the GOAT, and that’s because love has an uncanny ability to survive even the worst of memories.
English (US) ·