I wish I could just post Andrew Sullivan’s recent column about the World Cup’s significance, then finish my coffee and hit the gym.

It’s that good. No one writes language that grabs you like he does.

But I do have something to add. It is based on the advantages of my  soccer ignorance, which helps me see the Cup the way my then-young son viewed the first baseball game he ever saw. At the old Honolulu Stadium.

That helps me appreciate what Sullivan is saying: that the Cup is a spectacle far more wonderful and meaningful than the choreographed, contrived 250th anniversary celebrations occurring at the same time.

The Cup is the best damn Fourth of July speech you could ask for.

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Sullivan describes this year’s Cup as “an unexpected, fresh burst of globalized joy, a spasm of multiracial harmony, and the real shocker: a broad, genuine outburst of love for this country, its big-hearted people, and its unsung prosperity. “

“It’s the one obvious, uplifting, positive thing going on, and it feels like a fucking tonic.”

“And, he says,”you don’t have to be a soccer fan to get a lump in your throat.”

That’s right. You don’t, and I’m not. Still, I’ve experienced the sweet taste of that tonic.

Our experiences with the game are so different. Sullivan grew up in London, probably growing up with soccer the way I grew up with baseball.

My soccer experiences come from the world inside — inside your home, and inside your head. Sullivan’s is about the world outside. It’s a joyful combination.

What makes the Cup so awesome for me is that it’s so liberating to see the Cup the way my son experienced his first ball game in the Termite Palace on King Street.

He was maybe 3 at the time. First things he spotted were the billboards on the outfield walls — Olympia Beer, Servco, local eateries. He read them over and over again and asked me why they were there.

He asked me why one of the vendors “talked funny” then imitated him to prove his point. The game itself? Yeah, that too, kinda. I don’t remember any questions he had about that.

He had a great time because he saw and heard everything. For him it wasn’t a game. It was a spectacle.

No predispositions about what you are supposed to watch, no knowledge about the need to hit behind the runner on a hit and run.

Just plain fun, using all his small-kid time senses anyway he wanted. Like a cat sniffing a bunch of new Petco toys then going over to jump into the Safeway bag on the floor.

That’s what watching the world Cup allows me to do because, like my son, I am properly unprepared for it. So I watch like small-kid time.

I still can’t follow the offsides rule, and the best I say about the players’ talent is “what a way to use your head.”

There is so much going on, everywhere all the time, on the field, in the stands, non-stop. So much to see, hear, and feel, of course some of it on the pitch (my one soccer term), but much of it in the crowd.

I see the game like a 1960s Johnny Tillotson song:

“Poetry in motion
Walkin’ by my side
Her lovely locomotion
Keeps my eyes open wide”

Eyes and ears open wide, plenty to feel, plenty to absorb. That deep, no deeper.

The spectacle is so fluid — motion, constant motion. Start with the crowds, which are always  doing something loud and lovely. Non-stop. There are no cheerleaders because they are all cheerleaders.

They sustain songs, one after the other or maybe the same song, throughout the game, a combination of white noise and lusty community-choir singing.

The game itself is fluid because the action hardly ever stops. A player falls to the ground, maybe fouled maybe not. Then, whoops, you ok? Don’t take too long finding out. There’s a game going on here. 

It’s U.S. election time, which means it is talking head season — boring close-ups of smartly dressed women with coiffed hair and dark-framed glasses. Along with men with male pattern baldness wearing a suit jacket and a dress shirt looking out of place without a tie — all pontificating as the camera is locked in place. 

In a World Cup match there is everything to see here, everywhere. I’d rather try to read lips of some fan in the stands passionately singing in Portuguese with her arm around her boyfriend. Even though I don’t know a word of Portuguese.

Sit back and look at the colors. The team uniforms are colorful enough. The goalie outfits add real pizzaz, supposedly to stand out at their position on the field. But really I think it’s a chance to show off.

Come on! It’s a fashion statement, like if Tom Brady, who looks good in anything, played in a Smurf outfit because he wanted to show that he really did look good in anything.

In their all-bright-pinks or Kelly greens, the goalies look like clowns you’d hired for your kid’s third birthday.

I can picture a goalie in the finals wearing a Ronald McDonald clown costume that Micky D’s mothballed a few years ago after a bout of clown-phobia.

The team managers  add more contrast. Some dress like the town banker in a 1930s movie. Others look like they’re about to go bowling.

One more wonderful appeal to the senses — the Cup commercials. World Cup commercials need to appeal to a huge international audience, so they are spunky, musical, colorful, and easy to understand.

Compare that to the Super Bowl commercials, which used to be good and now stink, going from sense-appealing  cleverness to 30 seconds of music and text so ethereal and abstract that you can’t even figure out the product they’re trying to sell.

 “Hey, are they talking about computer chips or potato chips?”

One Cup commercial features a dog trying to make soccer moves. Yes! Cute, funny animals, as global as it gets.

Seeing it this way, through my child’s eyes and ears, helps you see the Cup broadly as a spectacle. And seeing the games as a spectacle helps you understand what Sullivan describes as the Cup’s true, ultimate importance.

Sullivan shows just how widespread and significant the World Cup spectacle is. All kinds of examples from all over the place, so many outside the stadium. Lawrence, Kansas, adopting the Algerian team, with the KU band learning the Algerian National Anthem.

Scots in kilts and Haitians taking selfies together. Tourists from other countries being in to the Midwest for the first time, saying how amazed they were with the America they saw rather than the America they hear about.

Full of fun, shtick, mutual curiosity and spontaneity. But deeper than ordinary tourism and ordinary fun.

“This has such special resonance and importance right now,” Sullivan says, “because the Cup is taking place in the shadow of America’s 250th anniversary.”

And the World Cup spectacle shows how “loving, generous, (and) bountiful” American culture remains.

“If it takes a soccer tournament rather than a choreographed 250th Anniversary celebration to remind us of that, so be it. We’re worth celebrating, nonetheless.”

I don’t think enough about America that way. Sullivan convinces me that I should.

It’s a winning goal.