But it wasn’t. The shot was bad, and Norway’s goalie saved it, and the Brazilian journalist lowered his phone, and then his head. I could hear a sad stream of Portuguese burbling from his mouth.

The whole game went like this. The Brazilians kept racing all over the field, creating good scoring chances, then bungling them in increasingly comical ways. “Vamos! Passa!” the Brazilian journalist would say at the beginning of an attack. He spoke to the players tenderly, pleadingly, as if they were his children. And then, as the ball would trickle past the goal, or onto the feet of a Norwegian defender, he would just stare straight ahead. As the minutes passed, goallessly, the Brazilian journalist seemed to be deflating. His suffering filled the press box like an unstable gas.

Finally, 79 minutes in, something did happen — a decisive moment, from a player who specializes in them.

We need to pause, now, to discuss the phenomenon of Erling Haaland. Haaland is Norway’s striker, the player in charge of scoring goals, and he has accomplished this task at a faster rate than anyone in the very long history of the sport. Haaland can score goals in any way Norway needs him to. He can run like an Olympic sprinter and rocket the ball at dangerous speeds off either foot; he can twist like a ballerina, midair, to dink shots delicately at strange angles; he can carry a whole pile of defenders around, like a cheerful grandfather of quintuplets, and leap to head the ball in.

But it’s not just the goals, or the way he scores them, that has made Haaland the breakout superstar of this World Cup. It is absolutely every single thing about him. Haaland seems to have been summoned from a secret fjord, out of a potion of dragon fire and glacier water, to take over all the world’s screens. He is 6-foot-5, with golden blond hair that spills over his shoulders. Everything he does is flamboyant and cartoonish and mythic. He inhales memes and exhales GIFs. Maybe you’ve seen the photo of that time he kicked a ball straight into a defender’s face from close range, flattening both face and ball in a way that seemed to defy physics. Or a video of his teammates jumping on his back and riding him around like a horse. Or an image of him celebrating a goal by sitting on the grass, in lotus position, closing his eyes to meditate. (This is the lock screen of my daughter’s phone.)