Final score: Chelsea 2, Barcelona 2, with Chelsea advancing to the finals in Munich on a 3-2 aggregate score (the Blues beat Barca 1-0 in London last week).

The guys blogging the ESPN GameCast concluded thusly: “One of the best games of football ever.”

My response? Well, depends on what you mean when you say “best.” I might have a little trouble going that far, because in my mind a great match involves two great teams slugging it out. And as much as I love my Blues, this particular Chelsea team is a) old, b) injured, and c) nowhere NEAR as good as Barca. On paper, anyway.

But it was nonetheless one of those remarkable moments that illustrates the value of coaching, of strategy, of fanatical commitment to tactical execution and an equally amazing capability to overcome adversity. If anybody ever asks you for an example of the value of teamwork, you show them the playback of this match.

• One of your starting center backs was out with an injury.
• His replacement, who has played beautifully in recent games, goes down with an injury very early on.
• Then the team’s other starting center back, the captain the backbone and the soul of the team, takes what may be the dumbest, most inexcusable red card I have ever seen by a player at his level in this big a game. It was truly mind boggling.

So there they were. Down to ten men. On the road. In one of the most inhospitable environments anywhere in the sporting world. Against one of the two or three best teams in the game and the defending champions of the most prestigious club competition on the planet. Minus their three top-choice defensive center backs. With Barca’s stingy ball-control offense dominating possession something like 73% to 27% and outshooting the Blues 23-7. And, at one point, down 2-0.

If you scripted it, nobody would believe you. It was Rocky. It was 300. It was Braveheart. I have honestly never seen anything like it, with the possible exception of the aforementioned US hockey victory over the mighty Soviets in 1980. The Villanova and NC State NCAA hoops championships, which most Americans are familiar with, don’t come close. Kurt Gibson’s pinch-hit jack against Dennis Eckersley? Multiply that minute of adrenaline by 90.

In the end, I guess it comes down to how you define “best.” If your terms demand everyone’s consensus top teams (say the Lakers vs. the Celtics in the ’80s) then no, this flawed Chelsea team had to park a bus in front of the goal and pray for luck. Which they got, in spades – time and again, over the two matches, Barca rattled the woodwork (we were joking during the game that Chelsea should give the captain’s armband to the post); one goal today was disallowed due to offsides (a good call, but a close one); and everyone’s candidate for greatest player in the world, Lionel Messi, somehow contrived to gank a penalty. How do you say “shoulda coulda woulda” in Catalan?

However, if your definition of best allows for this level of one-sidedness and places a premium on sheer human drama, then yeah, today’s match was genuinely epic, and you’ll be hearing it talked about with awe for years to come (especially if Chelsea goes on to win in Munich against Bayern or Real Madrid, a question that will be decided tomorrow). They’ll be replaying Ramires’ cheeky first-half break-away chip-shot goal over Victor Valdes for the next century. No, that isn’t hype – it was a goal that would have made Pelé proud.

I don’t know that I have ever heard so much noise in a bar. (Well, technically, half a bar. The Barcelona end was kind of quiet.) The British Bulldog (the Denver home of the Chelsea Supporters Club) surely must have bounced when Fernando Torres put the capper on it. My friend Raf Noboa said there’s a Spanish barbershop on the floor below his office (in DC - Columbia Heights, by 14th St. & Park Rd., if you care about the specifics), full of Real Madrid supporters. “When Torres scored, the whole building literally shook.”

I have already said goodbye to many of my friends, because if the final is this thrilling I won’t live through it.

This post originally appeared on Scholars and Rogues.

But how could he? she wonders. He not only loves the arts, he’s socially conscious. When she tries to reconcile his opposition to our recent wars with the fervor with which he watches this violent sport, her cognitive dissonance gets the better of her.  (The sexes, of course, could be reversed, or the same.)

She resolves to accept the situation, but discovers that she can’t handle the life of a football widow. It’s not long before she’s pressuring you to go out during game-time.

First question: How many games a year, if any, do you give up for her? Incidentally, the answer “Every situation is different” doesn’t count.

Second question: If she decides “I didn’t sign on for this” and insists that you give up all or more of football than you’re willing (I know: this may be a function of a relationship already in trouble), which would you choose: football — or your wife or girlfriend?

*Since I don’t follow college football, I can’t speak to the stresses that watching it places on a relationship.

But after his death, the doubts were back.

“Maybe you can’t change” replaced all of the hope that he would get things straight and finally show the consistent talent that fans caught glimpses of once he died last year. But maybe it wasn’t that simple. No, actually, it really wasn’t that simple.

An alarming article that was released today indicated that Henry had a form of degenerative brain damage at the time of his death – something that has been coming up far more frequently than it should, given the state of sports and technology today.

Chris Henry, the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver who died in a traffic accident last year, had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a form of degenerative brain damage caused by multiple hits to the head — at the time of his death, according to scientists at the Brain Injury Research Institute, a research center affiliated with West Virginia University.

—snip—

Researchers have now discovered CTE in the brains of more than 50 deceased former athletes, including more than a dozen NFL and college players, pro wrestler Chris Benoit and NHL player Reggie Fleming.

Repeated blows to the head are the only known cause of CTE, researchers say. Concussive hits can trigger a buildup of toxic tau protein within the brain, which in turn can create damaging tangles and threads in the neural fibers that connect brain tissue. Victims can lose control of their impulses, suffer depression and memory loss, and ultimately develop dementia.

Long lasting symptoms and issues arising from concussions are the dirty little secret in sports, and have been for a long time. Whether it is the “macho factor” that makes someone think that he (or she) has been so good for so long that they can overcome a few hits to the head or whether it is just the fact that coaches, teams and players want to do whatever they can to win that they may “shake off” the dizziness or whether it is something else entirely, it ruins lives – regardless what the sport.

Boxing is the obvious example, where the entire sport is based on how hard you can his someone else in the head repeatedly. And wrestling, where steroids, concussions and other health related issues have resulted in a number of high profile deaths in recent years – Chris Benoit being one of the more well known cases in recent memory.

But football (not just Henry, but remember Al “8 concussions” Toon?) has been a sport where high profile deaths only seem to briefly bring post concussion symptoms and health issues to the discussion (like Mike Webster, among others). Hockey had one of its “golden can’t miss superstars of a generation”, Eric Lindros, have his career marred by concussions, and even the requirement of helmets hasn’t stopped the stream of concussions as a total of close to 760 NHL players were diagnosed with concussions between 1997 and 2008.

While this obviously isn’t limited to sports, since this is a sports blog, I’ll stay in that area. The Sports Legacy Institute, is doing some major research into the area of brain injuries and CTE. The SLI, Christopher Nowinski and Boston University School of Medicine are working together to try and solve this crisis in sports (as well as the military). Hopefully one day, many less players will suffer from these injuries, fans can watch without wondering whether a player is going to “come back from that hit” and players can have a career, as well as post career life that isn’t cut needlessly short.

A lot rides on the outcome, and not just of this one game. In general, World Cup 2010 is a watershed moment for soccer in the US, and billions of dollars hang in the balance. On the pitch, this American team is as capable as any we’ve had, perhaps ever. And our infrastructure is improving daily, with better youth programs, better intermediate development programs and academies, a rapidly improving pro league and more and more of our top players finding their way into European sides – and the ability to succeed in top-of-the-table sides in England, Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Holland is the real measure of where you stand in the global food chain.

So you can expect American teams to keep getting better and better, regardless of the result in South Africa.

The reason Copa 2010 is so important, though, is money. If the US gets out of the group stage (not guaranteed, but we should) and perhaps wins in the round of 16, that sends a message to the American sports fan that the US is a serious player in the world’s game. As I noted several years ago, people carp about soccer for a number of reasons (low scoring, for instance), but when push comes to shove, what really keeps us away from MLS parks and televised games is the fact that, well, a lot of pissant little countries are better than we are. And from the limited and jingoistic perspective of the typical American sports fan, if Wherethefuckistan beats you at something, that something isn’t a valid game by definition.

And make no mistake, Americans like to win. We insist on it. We’re used to being the best and at some level we probably feel it’s our right. And frankly, we don’t much trust any sport where godforsaken France is better than us.

Think about it. What sports will Americans plop down their money for? Football? You betcha – and we’re the best at it (of course, that’s pretty much by default, isn’t it?) Baseball? Our game, and we’re the best in the world at it. Hoops? Ditto, although the rest of the world is slowly catching up. Hockey? Ummm, well, we’re #2 right now, and to be honest, our fourth most popular sport draws pathetic TV ratings (which sucks, because I feel like you can’t possibly not love the game if you know a little about it).

What else? Well, to a lesser extent, tennis, golf, maybe even a little track and field. Boxing. Stock car racing. And these are all sports where if we aren’t the best at the moment, we were recently enough and fully expect to be again in the near future. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there is pretty much no sport that Americans care enough to watch in significant numbers that we aren’t a world power in.

Lately, though, something has been changing where the American sports consciousness is concerned. A few weeks ago I woke up one morning, flipped on SportsCenter to find that the top story was … not the NBA playoffs. Not the previous evening’s MLB results. Not even – gasp! – the LeBron James free agency soap opera. Nope. It was that the injury to German captain Michael Ballack (he’d been chopped down in an egregiously dirty play in Chelsea’s FA Cup final win against Portsmouth) was going to keep him out of the Cup.

Think about that for a second. It’s SportsCenter. The top story is that the German captain has been ruled out of the World Cup. This was certainly the 7th Sign. All across America walls were bleeding, velvet Elvises were crying, storm clouds were gathering over deserted soccer fields, fallen angels were materializing in truck stop restrooms with cryptic messages for the Earth’s leaders…

Still, if you’ve been paying attention, you realize that most American media outlets have been taking futbol a lot more seriously of late, and ESPN never misses a chance to inject some goal or another into its plays of the day. ESPN’s interest is obvious – they televise MLS and have picked up the contract to carry Premiership games in the UK (some of which make their way onto ESPN2 HD), and we can probably expect more of this during the coming season.

If the US team earns some glory on the field in South Africa, then perhaps it justifies some of the hype in the mind of Joe Footballfan (who probably even played soccer as a kid, and who’ll perhaps watch a team that makes him feel good about himself before he will one that finds a way to lose to a nation he can’t even find on a map). If the Americans flame out (like they did four years ago), though, ESPN is going to realize a lot less from its investment that it might otherwise.

So best of luck to Landon and Gooch and Jozy and Tim and the Bradley family and the rest of the boys wearing those goddamned awful Nike uniforms. The fate of American marketers rests with your speed, your power and your courage.

Okay, maybe that’s a tad snide.

We all know that if soccer ever becomes the national pastime, it won’t be anytime soon. But there’s plenty of room in this country for the growth of such an engaging sport, and I can easily imagine soccer being a bigger deal in terms of revenues and ratings than hockey is (not hating on hockey here – I wish it were a bigger deal nationwide, as well).

I love the game, and don’t see any reason why you have to choose between soccer and football. We can love all of it, you know? (Isn’t that what America is about? All of it. Hell, that ought to be in the Pledge of Allegiance.) And American success in South Africa moves us a few more steps down that road.

So best of luck to our team – may they stand us all proud over the next couple of weeks…