Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe and a modern day masterpiece that will live forever

If you watched Sunday’s World Cup final between Argentina and France, I don’t need to explain.

You know exactly what I mean.

This soaring 2022 World Cup final in Qatar will be forever. It doesn’t get lost in the memory bank. Sportswriters like yours truly are prone to comical hyperbole, but I feel this bit of bloviation is safe: Argentina vs. France now lives with the best sporting events you ever saw, no matter what the sport, and how old you are.

Even if you are two days old, and all you have to compare it to is that cuckoo Vikings-Colts game.

You’ll tell everyone who missed it: Argentina won, settling a 3-3 match on penalties. It’s a cruel, gimmicky device to settle a masterpiece like this, and it almost never feels like a satisfactory finish, but it was hard to feel cheated at the end of this one.

This World Cup final had nearly everything. It had outrageous swings of momentum — Argentina rushing off to a 2-0 lead, dominating the first half and most of the second, until France suddenly lifted itself off the canvas to tie with a fistful of minutes left.

In extra time: A brilliant goal by Argentina’s Lionel Messi, his second of the night. Then: A penalty kick equaliser by France’s Kylian Mbappé, his hat-trick third, to join the late two he scored in regular time and push the game straight back to the ledge.

It was a clash too good to be true, in real time. The first 60 minutes felt like a coronation. The second 60 minutes felt like holding on to the hood of a speeding car.

As for Messi and Mbappé: spectacular. As sports observers we harp so much on the failures and shortcomings of superstars — the great players who do not deliver in the biggest moments. It’s empty theatre of scolding and schadenfreude, because it’s not what we actually want.

To see two of the greatest to ever do it — a 35-year-old generational superstar, and his 23-year-old successor — play at the height of their powers, is what we want, because it’s unadulterated joy.

Messi, seeking the first World Cup title, played with incandescent fury. Mbappé, well-defended and invisible early, burst back almost single-handedly to make it a match.

Messi was Messi, Mbappé was Mbappé. It was all you could ask for.

I haven’t even gotten to the scale of all this — how a World Cup is truly worldly, with the heart rates and birthrates of continents rising and falling with each shift in momentum. It all means so much more.

Look at the reactions at the end. A blank-faced Mbappé sitting on the turf, unmoved by the consolation of France’s President, Emmanuel Macron. Look at the assiduously reserved Messi, singing at the top of his lungs. An undersized phenom who left for Spain in his early teens, Messi has occasionally been seen as a stranger to his own home country. He now joins — and likely surpasses — Diego Maradona as a national football hero.

It’s what you want. It’s all you can ask for. It’s hard not to be cynical about sports, the grimy business of it, the trappings of corruption that were never more present than they were at this misbegotten World Cup.

Think of how rarely hype delivers on expectations. How often do these promised “epics” disappoint? How often have you rolled your eyes at proclamations of “greatest _______ ever” from sports mouths who can barely remember what happened last week?

And yet…

Argentina vs. France will be forever. I think it’s safe.

You’ll remember just like Messi and Mbappé. It was that good.

– Wall Street Journal