Editor’s Note: Amy Bass is professor of sport studies at Manhattanville College and the author of “One Goal: A Coach, a Team, and the Game That Brought a Divided Town Together” and “Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete,” among other titles. The views expressed here are solely hers. Read more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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American sports fans, if you don’t love soccer now (and yes, you can call it that — this whole “football versus soccer” thing is just stupid and unbecoming to global society), there might be no hope for you.

Argentina’s shootout victory over defending champion France in the men’s World Cup final on Sunday at Lusail Stadium in Qatar was a showdown between two of the most powerful soccer cultures in the world. And it didn’t just deliver: It created possibly the greatest championship game in the history of sport.

The World Cup is coming to North America in 2026, so even if you missed Sunday’s clash of the soccer titans, you have four years to get up to speed on why this epic match serves as an exemplar of soccer’s greatness and its power to galvanize a truly global conversation about sport as a vehicle to inspire and transform.

Even before the first touch, the most obvious narratives of this final had already been…