When I was sixteen, I learned the word agonistes from an article about Roberto Baggio in a British soccer magazine. Baggio had scored two goals against Nigeria, one against Spain, and two against Bulgaria to lead the Italian squad to the 1994 World Cup final, where they would face Brazil. That game ended zero to zero after extra time, and was decided by a penalty-kick shootout. Baggio, who had done more than anyone to bring his team to the cusp of glory, missed his penalty kick and instantly became the reason why they lost. The article suggested he was never the same after.

The term Italian sportswriters use for a player like Baggio is “fantasista.” A fantasista traditionally wears the number ten and plays right behind the front strikers, whom he serves. The number ten contemplates the field and then schemes. He sets up the strikers to score. “The Divine Ponytail”—Baggio’s nickname inspired by his hairstyle—was a fantasista plus: he was not only a creator of goals but, always controlled and unhurried, he also scored them. Baggio was adored. In 1990, after he was sold to a rival team, riots broke out in the city of Florence.

The first time I saw Baggio play, the grown ups around me remarked that he was a great player, that he was playing with a hamstring injury, and that the blue athletic tape around his right thigh was probably too hot in the noonday sun. It was the day of the World Cup final, Pasadena, 1994, and my dad and I were watching it with a group of friends on a big screen. By the end of the game, my ten-year-old self understood that Something Very Sad had happened to Roberto Baggio. He had become more than a great player with an unlucky injury: he had become a cursed hero and because of that, a legend. Every four years the World Cup mints new legends in one of two ways: through triumph or tragedy. The legend of Baggio was forged by both.

I’ve watched Baggio’s goals over and over again, for the sudden switch from left to right, the swerve and duck, the probing pass and the odd casualness and patience of his play. Watching Baggio’s highlights was also an education in existence: this great player was, like Jacob, forever marked. The first became the last, within the span of one tournament, and it wasn’t Baggio’s fault. At least, no one could blame him. The image that remains with me is one where a sobbing Baggio wipes his eyes with his thumb and index finger.

That was all a long time ago, but I recently saw Baggio again. It was a hot Sunday afternoon in June, and I was in the Rocco B. Commisso Stadium at Columbia University, where a handful of the greatest soccer players came together for a half-hour exhibition game, organized by F.I.F.A. and a Catholic nonprofit called the Grow Together Foundation.

Del Piero, Baggio, Pirlo, Nesta, Panucci, Vieri, Materazzi. These names mean nothing to most Americans. They are not the names of superstars like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. But to Italians, they are the names of players who are more than athletes or celebrities; they are something closer to George Washington, figures who command not only adulation, but respect. They also command respect among those Italian Americans who, reconnecting with the old country, have developed a taste for football—that is, calcio—that is, soccer. I am neither Italian nor Italian American, and I went to the match mainly to catch a glimpse of the great Baggio, the oldest name in the F.I.F.A. Legends Match roster, a man pushing sixty, who reached the peak of his accomplishments twenty-eight years ago in the 1994 World Cup.

Columbia’s soccer stadium stands a few hundred feet from that university’s much larger football stadium, and both are located in the far northern tip of Manhattan. Alongside the soccer stadium runs the New York City subway, an elevated branch of the A train. The sun inflamed the aluminum bleachers. Every few minutes, the train marched behind us. I saw two Baggio jerseys in the stands. The first was on the back of an old retiree, helped into his seat by two people who were either his nurses or grandchildren. He had on the number ten jersey that Baggio wore in the last team that he played for professionally: Brescia, from Lombardy. More than likely, this man had lived most of his life in the United States. But at that moment, he was what he had been in his childhood: a soccer fan and an Italian.

Behind me sat two young men, one of whom wore Baggio’s Italian national team kit from the 1994 World Cup. (“Vintage jersey, I got it online.”) The man was restless, like most of the people in the stands. The pre-game formalities were taking longer than expected. The sun hung high above us as one man spoke from a dais for what seemed like half an hour.

Giuseppe Commisso, one of the organizers of the event, the son of Rocco, spoke before the sun-addled crowd of about a thousand people. He presented himself as an elder statesman of soccer and delivered a long speech about the decline of the game in Italy. He lamented that Italy had not qualified for the World Cup since 2014, and that the Italian league was no longer the best in Europe. He enjoined Italians to begin again, to go for the gold, to—but the crowd would not let him finish. Instead, it tried to drive out Commisso with chants and boos, and the men flanking him gestured for quiet.

But the crowd did not quiet down. Commisso droned on, even though his speech had become inaudible. One of the men shushing the crowd was Father Luigi Portarulo, “Don Luigi,” the popular Italian priest who has been serving the expat community in New York for the past four years. He celebrated mass for the players before the match, played alongside them, and even scored a goal. By all accounts, he was instrumental in making the event happen.

I’ve never been a great soccer player and know nothing of what it would be like to play professionally, much less in the great Italian league of the 1990s. Moreover, as my teams are Paraguay and the United States, I will probably never know what it feels like to win the World Cup. But I do have one thing in common with these Italian legends: I know what it is like to be a middle-aged man playing soccer on a Sunday afternoon. On those Sundays, the breakdown happens in slow motion: one moment you think you control your body and the next, you find that your limbs are driven by external forces, the way the wind grips the sails of a windmill. Most middle-aged men, like myself, make up for lack of speed and control by becoming extra scrappy, maybe even violent. These Italian legends, on the other hand, had lost their speed, but not their elegance. The game was closer to ballet than sport, and no less entertaining for that.

The game was played on a field two thirds the size of a regulation soccer pitch, the goalposts having been moved forward a few yards. The smaller frame made it easier to admire the player’s exquisite movements. There was Andrea Pirlo, a 2006 World Cup winner, with the same hair from that time, flowing locks, very Armani. He was a deep-lying midfield playmaker known for his long, probing passes: his greatest asset was his vision, he played with his eyeballs. There was Christian Vieri, a centerforward who always reminded me of a soldier, or a tank: he only ever had one job, and he did it well. The most popular player among the kids eating nachos in front of me was a defender, Marco Materazzi: he was, after all, the one who actually scored for Italy in the 2006 World Cup Final. He was also the man on the receiving end of Zinedine Zidane’s infamous headbutt. Those kids hadn’t been born yet when all of that happened. They must have learned about the legend from their parents.

The game was brief—fifteen-minute halves—which was just as well, because a match like this could only serve one purpose, which is to jog your memory. The game itself was not the thing. It was a means to the thing. The thing is a memory of greatness, but seeing too much of the legends play can become uncomfortable: you start to notice their natural decline and, after that, your own.

The men behind me were chatting.

“What do they do now?”

“They just make money. Nothing! They make money. They spend their time in coffee shops in Rome and in Milan.”

And Baggio? He didn’t play. He was too old. He coached the Italian team and sat on the sidelines. After the game, a crowd gathered along the path the players would take back to their locker rooms. Kids stretched their fingers towards them as they passed. The police held us back. For some reason, Baggio left early and through a different way. By chance, he passed right in front of me, alongside a handler of some sort, rushing to the bus. He went unnoticed except by me and another man. “That was Baggio,” the man told his son, who had been looking the other way. “I should have grabbed his hand.”