On the beach in Brazil, as you’d probably expect, everyone kicking around a soccer ball is very good. Small groups assemble on the sand, employing all manner of footjabs and curtsies to keep the ball aloft, laughing and enjoying the glory of casual athletic expression in the tropical sunshine. Along with g-string bikinis, male speedos, and colorful umbrellas, the futebol juggling groups are kind of like wallpaper–you’d really only notice if they were not there.

Away from the beach, evidence of Brazil’s infatuation with soccer abounds: the ubiquitous Pavlovian green pitch-glow emanating from TVs in bars and restaurants, basically everyone wearing a Neymar Jr jersey, “soccer court” singled out as a search feature on apartment-hunting websites, etc.

And urban Brazilian soccer tends to be less bucolic than beach soccer, at least as I experienced it. Last week’s Bahia vs. Palmeiras match at Allianz Parque in São Paulo, for example, featured two controversial video-review penalty kicks, one red card, a half dozen or so yellows, four goals, riot police, breathtaking athleticism, and protective mesh.

With the score tied 2-2 late in the game, Palmeiras’s defensive midfielder niftily evaded a tackler in his own end and galloped toward the center stripe. Since a player on each side had already been ejected, he exploited the additional space, accelerating to incredible speed.

For safety reasons, I was masquerading as a Palmeiras fan. Sitting just ten rows up in a sea of green jerseys, I let out an expectant gasp as he approached midfield, and thousands of my friends also gasped, and many rose to their feet.

One of Bahia’s bruisers stepped up to defend, and let’s pause here for a bit of background.

Bahia sits much farther down in the table than Palmeiras, and they brought their thug game to São Paulo: aggressive gang-tackling, gratuitous trash-talking, and muscular intimidation. This may sound ungentlemanly, but the thing is this: Palmeiras overplayed their own hand, flopping and diving and complaining incessantly to the referees with Edvard Munch faces and Groucho Marx gestures.

Late in the first half, one of Palmeiras’s side earned a red card, stirring up the home crowd. Next, the referee missed a foul by Palmeiras and a few minutes later he paused the game, stepped into some green space, and put his finger to his ear the way people do when they’re on a phone call.

He was communicating with an off-field official, and after a few agonizing minutes, he indicates that he will review the play on video. He indicates this by drawing a rectangle in front of his chest–a gesture so absurd and childlike that the home crowd of course has no choice but to go completely insane. Sure enough, the poor referee does in fact determine that a penalty kick is warranted, and Bahia’s ace quickly deposits the ball in the goal, tying the game and causing the Palmeiras green to go positively bezerk.

At halftime, Palmeiras players surround the referee, complaining and pleading, but he, joined now at midfield by his two linesman, stands politely with his hands behind his back. The players slowly drift away and four men wearing brown Carhart onesies, with helmets and visors and riot shields, walk out to escort the referees off the field to their locker room, to take a leak or get some water or whatever it is referees do during halftime, without getting, like, de-mapped by the Palmeiras fans.

The second half begins looking like soccer for a bit, with accurate passing, beautiful movement into green space, and delicate dribbling. But soon enough it devolves into basically a professional wrestling match. Palmeiras players, entirely untouched, go down as if knifed. Bahia’s bulky sweeper, emboldened by the crowd’s anger, takes runs at any player who leaves the ground for a header, and Palmeiras’s diminutive veteran striker invites the fans to join him in ceaselessly berating the officials.

With Palmeiras up 2-1, an apparent handball by the home team has the referee again pausing to reflect. And again after conversing with someone via his Bluetooth headset, he draws a rectangle in front of his chest, which is just simply too much for the Palmeiras faithful.

The referee calls for a penalty shot–the correct call–and the same guy on Bahia scores again, easily, and the score is tied and everyone in green sitting near me is apoplectic, and I learned my first Portuguese swear words from some of the friendly Palmeiras fans sitting with me in section 132.

David Greenblatt wrote a fine book called Futebol Nation: The Story of Brazil through Soccer, in which he celebrates the beauty and majesty of the game as it’s played and enjoyed in Brazil, but also…well let me give you a taste. In his last chapter, he painstakingly details dozens of the most horrific acts of violence committed by and against Brazilian players, referees, fanatics, and innocent bystanders over the last hundred years. What accounts for this? He writes:

[I]n a world that constantly strips [young men] of economic dignity and offers them little but enduring marginalization, humiliation in public becomes simply intolerable. It is the same rage and embarrassment that fuel pitch invasions when a team is losing or attacks on players who have let them down. From acts of grotesque rural revenge to the urban riots of the national championships, unchecked by the police and ignored by the sport’s authorities, Brazilian football has been a conduit for the mental and emotional pathologies of a still brutalized society.”

from Greenblatt’s book, right there at the bottom of page 221

Greenblatt’s book, most of which is as pessimistic as the quotation above, rattles around in my mind amidst the circus-like atmosphere at Allianz Parque, as Palmeiras fans near me stand to express their displeasure and Palmeiras players surround the referee, physically preventing him from placing the ball on the penalty stripe so Bahia’s man can have his go at a second, completely warranted penalty kick.

Finally, the ball is placed and Bahia scores, easily.

The mesh, the riot police, and the incredibly thorough and extremely serious patdown induced in this ticket-paying attendee the sort of feeling you might get when, for example, you’re headed to a new friend’s house with a pack of other new friends and one of them, just before you arrive, hands you a knife and says, “You probably won’t need this, but you never know.”

But back now to Palmeiras’s defensive midfielder, approaching the center stripe, with the score tied 2-2 and with ten minutes left in the game. At a full and nearly reckless gallop, he spies the Bahia defender stepping up to tackle him. His options are few. No teammates nearby to receive a pass, no time to swerve left or right, no patience or goodwill left from Bahia.

Instinct propels his body into the air. He also spins, tapping the ball with his right foot, then dragging it with his left. It’s a move called the Maradona, a feat of high-speed athletic genius, the kind we pay money to see, and which only a professional is capable of, made all the more spectacular when executed under the threat of physical harm and public humiliation.

Under an ashen sky and a ring of golden lamps suspended over fifty-thousand gasping fans in green, he spins and soars and for just a split second all of us realize all of our hopes.