Yesterday, Spain won the World Cup. The trophy was lifted. Confetti filled the air. As the tournament ended, the last wave of supporters headed home while millions of others were already back in dozens of countries, carrying whatever souvenirs they’d collected during a month in North America. Somewhere among them was a Norwegian soccer star with a taxidermied raccoon.

There really isn’t another sporting event like the World Cup. Every four years, for one extraordinary month, national identity becomes the world’s most popular spectator sport. People who spend the rest of their lives arguing about politics, religion, or almost anything else suddenly find themselves united behind the same eleven players wearing the same colors. The tournament doesn’t belong to clubs or leagues. It belongs to countries.

The Olympics come closest, but they’re fundamentally different. The Olympics celebrate breadth, asking us to marvel at hundreds of events across dozens of sports. The World Cup is almost monastic in its focus. Twenty-two players. One ball. One trophy. For a month, a substantial portion of humanity cares about exactly the same thing. (As an aside, this BBC montage of the tournament is fantastic.)

But as much as I love the soccer, that wasn’t what made this tournament unforgettable. It was the travelers.

I was lucky enough to attend several matches myself during this World Cup. The first was Switzerland versus Qatar. If I’m being honest, I didn’t particularly care who won. It didn’t matter. Forty thousand people around me cared enough for all of us.

For two hours, I borrowed their passion. Fans sang songs I’d never heard. Flags I’d rarely seen outside geography textbooks waved in every direction. Every completed pass, every missed opportunity, every referee’s whistle felt monumental because the people around me treated it that way. Their enthusiasm became my enthusiasm.

A week later, Parisa and I landed in Mexico City on the night (coincidentally) Mexico was playing at the Azteca. I’ve been fortunate to visit a lot of cities. I’ve never seen one quite like that.

Every restaurant had its televisions pointed toward the match. Every plaza filled with people hours before kickoff. Cars rolled through intersections with enormous Mexican flags streaming from their windows while complete strangers shouted “¡México!” across traffic and received equally enthusiastic replies. The city wasn’t simply watching soccer. It was participating in it.

A few days later, we joined a taco tour and met a man from South Africa who may become the person I remember most from this entire World Cup. He had flown from Johannesburg to Mexico City for South Africa’s opening match. Then he flew to New York, rented a car, drove to Atlanta for the second game, and eventually made his way to Monterrey for the final group-stage match. Thousands of miles, two countries, and countless hours on airplanes and highways, all to follow one national team.

Naturally, we asked him about his trip. What had been his favorite part of North America? The tacos? Times Square? The mountains? The people? He smiled. “Buc-ee’s.”

We laughed. Not because he was wrong – Buc–ees is undeniably amazing – but because his answer was wonderfully specific. He wasn’t talking about the rows of gas pumps or the oversized beaver mascot. He was talking about the employees shouting, “Fresh brisket on the board!” every time another brisket came out of the smoker. Somehow that joyful little chant had become the story he was most excited to carry home to Johannesburg.

The more I thought about it, the more perfect his answer seemed. Throughout the tournament I kept seeing visitors fall in love with things most of us stopped noticing years ago. A Brazilian couldn’t believe the size of American pickup trucks. A German was delighted by free refills. An English supporter became inexplicably obsessed with ranch dressing. Another visitor wondered why every drink contained enough ice to preserve a woolly mammoth.

None of them were discovering hidden treasures. They were discovering ordinary North America. That’s what travel does. It edits our stories.

Nobody comes home talking about baggage claim or the hotel room. We remember the ordinary things that felt extraordinary because they were unfamiliar: the bartender who insisted we try the local beer, the tiny bakery we found after a wrong turn, the Tokyo 7-Eleven selling fresh meals, or the Nordic hotel that solved blanket stealing with two separate duvets.

None of those moments would appear in a travel brochure, yet they are often the ones that stay with us. Travel sharpens our attention. It makes us notice the small customs, habits, and encounters that locals stopped seeing long ago. Sometimes it takes going halfway around the world to discover something new. Sometimes it takes a visitor to help us see what was already there.

That realization brought me back to Robert Lewis Taylor’s The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction in 1959. Like every great travel story, the novel begins with a destination. Twelve-year-old Jaimie McPheeters and his physician father, Sardius, leave Missouri in 1849, joining thousands of Americans heading west after news of gold in California. Like nearly everyone around them, they believe California promises reinvention. Wealth. Adventure. A chance to begin again.

The farther west they travel, however, the less important California becomes. Instead, Taylor fills the trail with an astonishing parade of humanity: gamblers, prospectors, swindlers, preachers, doctors, merchants, soldiers, entertainers, pioneers, widows, dreamers, and drifters. Some become companions for hundreds of pages. Others disappear almost as quickly as they arrive, continuing down the trail and out of the novel forever. At first, the structure feels almost chaotic. Taylor keeps introducing fascinating people just as you’re settling into the last group. Characters drift into Jaimie’s life, dominate a few chapters, and then quietly move on. If you’re a reader accustomed to tightly engineered plots, you may wonder whether the novel is ever going to settle down.

Eventually, though, you realize Taylor isn’t losing control of the novel. He’s recreating what travel actually feels like. When we remember a trip, the itinerary fades long before the people do.

That’s Jaimie’s gift. He’s curious in the way children often are before adulthood convinces us we should already know everything worth knowing. He asks questions. He listens. He notices details everyone else overlooks. His greatest talent isn’t surviving the frontier. It’s paying attention. By the time he finally reaches California, the Gold Rush itself almost feels incidental. The real treasure had been traveling beside him all along.

In some ways, this World Cup felt like a twenty-first-century version of Jaimie McPheeters’ journey. In 1849, Americans crossed a continent searching for opportunity. In 2026, the world crossed an ocean to visit us. The direction changed, but the lesson didn’t. The journey was never really about the destination. It was about the people encountered along the way.

Months before the tournament began, newspapers devoted endless coverage to whether North America was ready to host the World Cup. Would the airports work? Would transportation collapse? Would there be enough hotel rooms? Would security hold?

They were fair questions. By the end of the tournament, though, I found myself asking a different one: Were we good hosts? I think so. Not because every train ran on time or traffic wasn’t terrible. Visitors rarely remember logistics. They remember how a place made them feel. They’ll remember the strangers who made an unfamiliar country feel unexpectedly familiar.

One of my favorite parts of this World Cup was watching patriotism quietly give way to hospitality. Flags stopped feeling like political statements and became invitations to conversation. Adults who normally avoid eye contact found themselves talking in airport terminals, train stations, breweries, food halls, and stadium concourses. The questions were almost always the same: Where are you from? How long are you here? Where are you headed next? What shouldn’t I miss? For one month, strangers became neighbors. I suspect that’s the souvenir many visitors carried home.

Like many Pulitzer winners from the middle of the twentieth century, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters won’t be for everyone. Readers looking for a tightly plotted adventure may find its pace frustrating. Taylor is perfectly willing to wander away from the central narrative because another interesting person happens to cross Jaimie’s path. Entire episodes exist simply to let us spend time with someone we’d never have invented ourselves.

Ironically, that’s exactly what makes the novel memorable. Taylor understands something every experienced traveler eventually learns: the detours aren’t interruptions. They’re the destination.

I’ve already forgotten who scored Switzerland’s goal against Qatar, and before long I’ll probably have to look up parts of the knockout bracket as well. That’s what happens with sports. Results blur together until only the champion remains. The people don’t.

I’ll remember the South African who somehow found his favorite memory of North America in a Buc-ee’s brisket chant. I’ll remember Erling Haaland deciding that the souvenir he couldn’t leave behind was a taxidermied raccoon from a western store in Dallas. On the surface, they couldn’t have been more different. And yet they were really the same story.

Like Jaimie McPheeters, they discovered that travel isn’t measured by the miles you cover or the landmarks you visit. It’s measured by the unexpected moments you never could have planned. Travel has never been about collecting places. It’s about collecting stories.

Millions of visitors returned home with jerseys, scarves, photographs, and souvenirs. I suspect the things they’ll treasure most, though, are the stories they never expected to collect.

So did I.

Mine just never left North America.