Everything is everywhere now. You can watch a match in Seoul at 3 AM, wearing another country’s jersey, feeling genuine anguish when they lose. A teenager in Montana can know more about Serie A than his neighbors know about the Broncos. Fandom is portable. Identity is downloadable. The whole point of the last thirty years is that geography stopped mattering. And yet. When the champion comes home, something happens that doesn’t happen anywhere else. Not at the stadium where they won. Not in the broadcast booth. Not in the highlight package with ten million views. Something happens in the specific square of the specific town where their mother still buys bread. I’ve been trying to figure out why. The best I can do is describe what I see.
The Scene
A UFC belt lands in a small city. Champion steps out at the airport. The ride toward the square is deliberately slow. Almost processional. Shop signs blink messages they’ve been saving. Kids wear gym hoodies like vestments. The old wrestling coach finds a spot near the front. His eyes are already wet. From a balcony: a speech that is never elegant and always perfect. Here’s the strange part. Everyone knows their role. The crowd claims: you are ours. The champion accepts: I am yours. Nobody rehearsed. The script seems to be older than language.
The Conversion
I think what’s happening is a kind of currency exchange. Global fame getting cashed out in local denominations. The feed gives you performance. The return gives you presence. The abstract achievement (belt, trophy, medal) gets fitted to specific streets and specific faces. “Before you belonged to the world, you belonged to us.” The crowd has receipts. They remember the missed penalty three years ago. They know about the divorce. Their love includes their knowledge. That’s what makes it worth something. Global fans can unfollow. Home can turn its back, and you’ll feel it in the grocery store forever. (This is also why hometown boos cut deeper than any away-crowd hostility. The same circuit that makes the love real makes the rejection unbearable.)
The Old Circuit
There’s a 19th-century historian who wrote about ancient cities. A world where membership showed in rites, tombs, soil. Where honors bound you to specific earth and specific dead. A crown meant “you are one of us and we know exactly where you stand.” Literally. Which ground your feet touch, which ancestors watch. This sounds impossibly distant until you see a champion touch the local war memorial before speaking. Then it doesn’t sound distant at all. The Romans did triumph parades. The Greeks crowned athletes at home shrines. We do open-top buses. The costume changes. The function holds.
How the Machinery Works
Layered publics. An athlete belongs to several imagined communities at once, nested like Russian dolls. The sport’s global public (everyone who understands what a perfect free kick means). A nation. A city. A club. A neighborhood (the corner store that sponsored the first uniform). The return collapses the stack with deliberate violence. For one day, one crowd with actual names and actual corners claims priority. The global gets grounded. The abstract becomes crushingly specific. Rites of passage. There’s a sequence so simple it feels like cheating: separation, liminality, aggregation. Watch any sports movie and there it is. The season separates (goodbye, normal life). The playoff run is liminal (anything could happen, time works differently). The parade aggregates. The hero returns transformed but still recognizable, strange but still ours. What people feel on that street, anthropologists call “communitas.” That effervescent moment when social structure dissolves and pure belonging bubbles up. The banker and the busboy are just voices in the roar. For an hour, the city becomes what it always claimed to be: one body with many cells, breathing together. Aura repair. Mechanical reproduction drains presence. Every highlight reel, every Instagram story, chips away at the unreproducible now. The feed flattens everything into content. But then: a live return in a bounded place. The star is not a clip. The star is here, sweating in our weather, squinting in our particular light. You can see them breathe. You can watch them search for words. The street supplies what the screen extracted. That’s why everyone puts their phones down (or holds them up differently, to capture rather than consume). Capital conversion. The person brings charismatic authority earned in the wider field. Goals scored on other continents, battles won in other time zones. The city offers to convert this cosmic currency into local denominations: a key to the city (medieval gesture, still works), a mural on the wall where everyone gets coffee, a day named in the calendar that schoolchildren will know forever. The person receives durable belonging. Not fan love, which evaporates, but civic standing, which settles into soil. The city receives condensed meaning and a story to hand down like a family watch. Both sides know exactly what they’re trading. Edge energy. The same force that crowns can blame. The crowd that lifts you up knows exactly how to tear you down. This isn’t a bug. It’s what makes everything real. Locality intensifies everything. Home can cheer loudest because home can judge hardest. They knew you before. They’ll know you after. That double edge (the risk of real rejection by people who matter) is the price of real recognition.
What the Square Has
Scale that fits bodies. Sound and attention stack until the air gets thick. The crowd becomes one animal with many eyes. This doesn’t work in the cloud. It barely works in stadiums. It needs walls for sound to bounce off, changed. Mutual risk. Live means mortal. A voice can crack wrong. A joke can miss. Everyone’s alert because something could actually happen. The feed is edited. The square is not. Accumulated memory. “Remember when the captain stood right there in ‘09?” Meaning grows by use, not by design. The pavement becomes a palimpsest.
The Uncomfortable Bottom Line
Globalization doesn’t erase the need for local grounding. It amplifies it. The more a person is seen everywhere, the more it matters that they’re seen somewhere by people who answer back with actual voices. I can’t fully explain why this need survived the internet. But it did. Ancient, embarrassing, and absolutely undefeated. The hearth still matters. The soil still speaks. And somehow, in 2025, a parade through a medium-sized city can make grown adults weep. We’re the species that returns.
Sources and further reading
- N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City
- Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
- Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
- Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage
- Victor Turner, The Ritual Process
- Max Weber, Economy and Society
- Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital”
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
- Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition
- René Girard, Violence and the Sacred
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces