I happened to be in New York during the World Cup’s quarterfinals. I was a little worried about my family’s vacation timing. If you take out the part about the heat index, the month of the tournament is my favorite time to be in Houston. The city’s diverse and international nature is on full display, and life in general seems heightened. So, while I was happy to be headed for New York after an absence of seven or eight years, and looking forward to showing my 12-year-old son the sights, I wondered if we had chosen the best time to go.

I also had the secret fear that New York would prove to be a much better World Cup-watching city than Houston, that the Apple’s heightened cosmopolitanism would put ours in the shade. Stupid, I know. We’re not New York, but sometimes it bugs me to be reminded.

Anyway, we were here, so I put on the Brazil team jersey (they were playing the Netherlands) that I got for Father’s Day and set out for Nevada Smith’s, an East Village bar that I’d read was ground zero (just as I write this I realize that Nevada Smith’s is close to the real Ground Zero) for New York World Cup watching. In anticipation of the crowds, the two-story bar had taken out all of its furniture, so that up to 100,000 beer drinking soccer fans could take in the tournament.

I got there early, and as the bar filled I noticed that no one was sporting team colors, and feared that my yellow jersey marked me as a tourist. Oddly I wasn’t even supporting Brazil. I’ve become very interested in Dutch soccer since reading David Winner’s Brilliant Orange: the Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer, which is the only sports book I’ve ever read that might be a work of genius.

I’m not going to be able to do the book justice here, but Winner makes a surprisingly convincing argument that the late 1960s Dutch concept of “total football,” in which everyone but the goalie can trade positions and go on the attack, is inspired by the Dutch landscape; Winner argues that these spatially challenged lowlanders are constantly on the lookout for better ways to manage space, and that they applied that mindset to soccer, just as (according to Winner) Rembrandt applied it to painting.

Anyway, I’m now something of a Holland fan, but, hey, Brazil is everybody’s default team, because of the Pele connection and the country’s now fading samba-football legacy, so I was happy to wear the shirt. I guess that shows how shallow my soccer roots run.

Nevada Smith’s became brutally filled, not unlike Richmond Arms for U.S.-England, and the four dudes pressed closest to me were playing a very annoying drinking game, shouting “Goalie’s handling the ball!” or “Slow motion replay!” and gulping their brews every minute or so, so I squeezed out at halftime and watched the Dutch put the nails in Brazil’s coffin in a quiet restaurant, where a Brazilian customer asked her waiter to put her meal in a to-go box so she could go home and “be sick.”

It was only after Brazil lost that I got the benefits of wearing the jersey. The rest of the day, as I strode the streets of Manhattan, I got expressions of sympathy (either that, or ‘What the hell happened?’) from all sorts of expats and a few Yanks. A couple of Dutch guys jeered at me for picking “the wrong team,” but for the most part I got unearned sympathy, which is surely the best kind. After a while I stopped telling people that I’d really wanted Holland to win.

That said, Manhattan didn’t seem particularly gripped by World Cup fever. Some bars were rocking, but in others as many people ignored the match as watched, and there was no discernible buzz in the air before Argentina-Germany, even though the game’s approach had me twitchy with anticipation. It appears that the ethnic wonderlands of Queens and hipster paradise of Brooklyn are more like, you know, ground zero.

The games themselves were all compelling, if not always for purely sporting reasons. The Dutch win over Brazil was a tremendous and well-earned upset. The Uruguay penalty-kicks victory over Ghana was rich with heartbreak, as the Ghanaians couldn’t net a penalty kick at the end of extra time that would’ve put them into the semis, and then missed two more kicks in the penalty phase. I felt bad for Ghana, and for Africa, but also delighted in Uruguay. I think I’ve developed a man-crush on the charismatic Diego Forlán, who scored another booming goal.

Germany-Argentina was an incredible display of slashing and defending soccer, but almost entirely on Germany’s part. (Germany won 4-0.) What a fabulous and dashing young team, composed largely of the sons of immigrants from Turkey, Ghana, and Poland, the Germans have. Of course, they also have young powerhouses named Mueller and Schweinsteiger.

The dream is over for Diego Maradona, who disdained defense and put together a team composed largely of strikers. It was fun while it lasted. Barring some terrible event, Lionel Messi will dream again in four years, of course. In the meantime he’ll have nightmares about swarming German defenders.

And, except for tiny Uruguay, the dream is also over for South America. Just days ago this looked like the Latin tournament, with most of the old European powers in disarray, and the South Americans ascendant. Instead, Brazil and Argentina cracked when Netherlands and Germany applied the pressure.

Paraguay went out against Spain with their dignity intact, even as they wore the most infantile, candy-cane socks I’ve ever seen on adults. They made powerful Spain work exceedingly hard for their 1-0 win, scored on a late, pinball-style goal by David Villa, who has scored six of his team’s seven goals. After what the Paraguayans put them through, I wonder if the Spaniards can be ready emotionally for their semi-final showdown with Germany on Wednesday. This game will be a rematch of the 2008 Euro 2008 championship game, which Spain won 1-0, giving the Iberians their only major tournament championship to date.

In that game stolid Germany represented old Europe, and Spain the fleet-footed, quick-thinking youngsters. It’s very possible that Wednesday will find these roles reversed.