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You can feel the difference with a World Cup final. Those new-age theories of energy travelling around the globe might have some ammunition. Even watching on television from the other side of the world, you can feel the nerves, the buzz, the electricity in the atmosphere that makes the hairs on your arms prickle upright.
This match would see history made, that much was assured. One of these sides would finally shake their nation’s perennial underachiever tag. Perhaps Spain already had.
One can’t claim that Argentines are bandwagon football fans.
While the streets weren’t as deserted as they had been for the home side’s games, there was just a smattering of traffic.
Of course, this may have had something to do with the fact that it was siesta time. While last night had been truly winter cold, today was daiquiri-warm. The leafy plazas can sometimes make one forget that Salta is a desert town at heart.
The plaza bars were still well-filled. Mostly with locals, though a few Dutch had emerged from the woodwork, wide-eyed and blinking in the light of day, the pallor of their skin contrasting with the glare of their orange kits.
The men on the pitch had taken their retinal assault to another level, resembling a troupe of late-night roadworkers let loose on their lunch break.
But what scenes they gave us, along with their counterparts in royal blue. Belying the 1-0 scoreline, a match full of intent and attack. A single goal in the dying minutes of extra time all that could separate two desperate teams in a titanic final.
Last year, Spanish midfielder Andres Iniesta broke Chelsea hearts when his 92nd minute strike sent Barcelona to a Champions League final. This time he did it on a stage so much bigger, with a goal after 116 minutes of intensely contested play.
This was truly a match that neither side deserved to lose, though Iniesta took care of that inevitable formality.
As they had against Germany, Spain crashed into attack early. Sergio Ramos belied his dopey-stoner appearance to create two sharp chances. Villa crashed the side netting shortly afterwards. Warning signs were rife for the Dutch.
It wasn’t a match for the ‘have a spoonful of concrete’ brigade, with English referee Howard Webb whistling up any semblance of contact and handing out yellow cards like cupcakes at a birthday party.
Anyone who went to ground in a tackle went into the book. Only van Bommel’s looked truly deserved, at least until Nigel de Jong went all Jackie Chan on Xabi Alonso’s breastbone. The mystery of how he avoided a red card will go down with the Bermuda Triangle and the Riddle of the Sphinx.
The Dutch went on to pick up nine yellow cards in the course of the match, the Spanish five. The next great act of brutality though was friendly fire, Casillas wiping out semi-final hero Carles Puyol in a furious attack on the ball. The skipper was playing for keeps.
The scenes in Salta’s bars were intriguing.
While one would expect Latinos to side with Spain, Argentina has the same uneasy, antagonistic, love-hate relationship with their colonial forebear as we have with the UK, the same burden and connection of an uncomfortable shared history.
Spanish fans were grouped in small pockets, no more numerous than the Dutch. Most of the crowd cried out as loudly when Robben blasted his shot clear off the foot of Casillas as they did minutes later when Villa did the same off Heitinga. Each shot saw the same hands over the same mouths, mirroring Robben’s expression of shock. These were people cheering football, not one side or the other.
The nervous tension ramped up with Spain’s second-half attacking. Villa collected a couple of shots in a couple of minutes, but never with quite enough time or space. Ramos blazed an unmarked header over from a corner. Iniesta burst into the box, but a classic tackle by repeat saviour Sneijder robbed him of the ball.
Like Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth, the bullfighters were struggling to find a way through.
Robben nearly countered in the 82nd, but saw Casillas get the ball marginally ahead of him. The winger’s repeated protests for a penalty only earned him a yellow for dissent, though Puyol had his arm firmly cinched around the Dutchman’s waist like a jealous boyfriend at a barndance.
The evenness of the display made it look headed nowhere but penalties. Luck and desperate defence saw every final touch foiled. Football critics may never understand it, but this had been 93 minutes of football so gripping that one didn’t even notice it was nil-all.
Extra time was no different, with Spain again starting brighter.
Blue shirts went down like Friday night beers as the ball ricocheted around their area, but not one of their fifteen penalty claims was deemed appropriate. Then Fabregas impersonated Robben, cannoning his shot into Maarten Stekelenburg’s foot.
Iniesta was again through on goal, but another desperate tackle, this time from van Bronckhorst, saw him disarmed a second time. Navas thundered a shot into the side netting. Fabregas sliced through midfield but fired wide. Stekelenburg was busy as Lalit Modi ‘s legal team.
After 109 minutes Heitinga pulled back Iniesta outside the box, earning a second yellow and an early exit. There was no question that the Dutch would bunker down for penalties now, though they had a chance to snatch the win when a Sneijder free kick ricocheted just wide off the wall.
But it wasn’t to be. In the 116th minute, Iniesta found himself clear in the box for a third time. Perhaps his opponent should have been Heitinga, or the substituted van Bronckhorst.
Neither was there.
A moment to steady. Right foot shot. Time to fill the mugs with the sweet froth of joy or the bitter dregs of disappointment.
In Salta, the reaction was more muted. They had their preferences, but nothing really mattered. “I supported Holland,” said Jorge, a Bolivian living in Argentina, “because they deserved it. This was already their third final. And because the Spanish already thought they were the best in the world, the best of the best.
Now that they’re champions, they’ll get worse. They’ll think they’re demigods.”
“He’s an idiot!” declared his sister Silvana. “I supported Spain because the whole Cup they played well. They won their games and played great football. They deserve it.” Any danger of a brawl? I asked. “No,” she says. “Argentina is all about peace and love.”
“It’s not a River-Boca game,” elaborated Jorge.
Juan was an anomaly – an Argentine wearing an Oranje shirt, speaking with a thick Cockney accent. “I really wanted Holland to win,” he said, “but Spain played a brilliant game. The important thing is, I’m glad that neither Brazil nor Italy nor Germany won, because then they’d get further up from us. We’ve got two World Cups, they’ve got more.”
His Dutch mate Thom sat alone looking disconsolate. Someone asked how he was feeling.
“I feel like someone who just lost the f***ing World Cup,” he said, pragmatism to the fore. I asked him about Robben’s key miss. But wasn’t in a mood for self-pity. “Robben had a couple of chances which he might normally take, but… so did the Spanish. And until you score, you don’t score,” he concluded philosophically.
Really there wasn’t much of a climax. Aside from the chanting of a few diehard Spanish fans, the crowds soon drifted away. They had wanted to watch football, and they had done so.
The momentousness and the joy and the despair were all the province of some other country, some other people.
The thing about history being written is that it often goes unremarked upon elsewhere. In Salta, the late afternoon sun lay sprawled across the city like a dog in front of a front of a fireplace.
The plaza lit up green and gold, and little kids chased each other in circles on the grass, shrieking in infant Spanish and delight.
In Spain at that moment, it must have felt like life had changed forever.
In Argentina, life went on.