Zidane’s final

Paris, 1998. Brazil are favorites. Zinedine Zidane scores two headers from corners. 3-0. The Champs-Élysées fills. A team of immigrants’ kids and suburban talent is sold, for a night, as the image of the republic.

French politics will spend the next decades fighting over that image. The soccer is simpler: a playmaker who looked like he had more time than everyone else, on home grass, in a final.

Later there will be a headbutt in Berlin. 1998 is the clean version — two headers, a trophy, a country that wanted the story to be true.