For Californians, In-N-Out is a religion.

As a transplant, I can confirm it’s pretty good stuff, a delicious Double-Double (order it “animal style” — trust me) easily the best hamburger you can get for under four dollars and under four minutes. Nothing at In-N-Out compares favorably to a Philly cheesesteak, but hey — when you move across the country, a few things inevitably get lost in translation.

After covering the opening game of the Copa America on Friday night, I staggered out of the stadium over two hours after the match ended, the final revisions to the match report bouncing in my mind and the promise of an hour-long drive back to my home in Berkeley looming unpleasantly before me. A quick trip to In-N-Out, about five miles from the stadium, would keep me awake long enough to get back to my bed, eighteen hours after I left it early Friday morning.

What greeted me was the longest fast-food line I’ve ever seen.

The line spilled out the door, a ten minute wait just to reach the counter. Every red plastic chair inside was taken, folks waiting nearly half an hour for their long-awaited red meat.

And more than two hours after the match had ended every single person was either wearing Colombian yellow or some combination of red, white, and blue.

I relay this anecdote because, as you all know, the Copa America Centenario hasn’t even come to Philadelphia yet, and if you believe what people are saying you should probably just set your tickets on fire right now.

At least, if you read certain reports on the Copa. According to Deadspin, the “scandal soaked tournament” has been a “disaster” with “sparse crowds” and “uninteresting play.”

It’s the sort of thermonuclear sentence you write when you have a keyboard that only produces three different scorching hot takes: “whichever team lost last night’s basketball game is literally the worst basketball team ever assembled,” “please click on this video of a guy hitting a home run,” and “any involvement of the United States in international soccer is doomed and subject to ridicule.”

Now, obviously it’s bad form to play the wrong national anthem. And the crowds have not been full to bursting in every venue. But the two matches played so far in Santa Clara — USA-Colombia on Friday and Monday night’s heavyweight bout between Argentina and Chile — have shown me a tournament miles from what that take would suggest.

Far from crowds so small they are almost played behind closed doors, Levi’s Stadium played host to a pair of sellouts in its first two matches. Both matches featured loud, raucous crowds, spilling out all around the stadium and even up the 101 Highway — American, Argentinian, Colombian, and Chilean flags billowing out windows as car after car slowly plowed its way down to Santa Clara.

Though the divided crowds may have denied the United States home-field advantage, they did bring a tremendous vibrancy to the match. Every goal scored — five in total over two games — carried with it a thunderous roar of celebration from the triumphant supporters, matched in every case by an correspondingly subtle groan of anguish from their opponents. The wave, so often pathetically attempted at a half-full baseball stadium, broke out multiple times, spinning around the stadium with a roar of cheers, picking up speed with each pass.

The soccer hasn’t been bad, either. The first matches of international soccer tournaments are often cagey affairs, two teams feeling each other out and trying to form a cohesive side. Certainly the first match for the Americans will not linger for long in the memory.

But Argentina and Chile put on a tremendous display of athleticism, intensity, and pure skill last night. The tackles, flying fast and frequent, could be felt even behind the plexiglass wall of the Levi’s Stadium press box. Sharp passes fizzed around the field. And Argentina scored a pair of brilliant counter-attacking goals, both low to Claudio Bravo’s right foot, that brought the crowd to their feet.

(It also brought tears to the eyes of many, as Angel Di Maria celebrated his 51st minute goal by commemorating his grandmother, who passed away just hours before the match.)

The Chileans, holders of the 2015 Copa America title, might come to regret their wastefulness from last night. Too much hesitancy in the box, too many critical lapses on the counter, a set-piece goal that came twenty minutes too late to do any good. But that’s the beauty of international tournaments — no matter where you stand when you come in, you’re always just one or two tough performances from elimination.

Look, this tournament isn’t perfect. My Copa America experience last night included paying fifty bucks to park on a golf course nearly a mile from the stadium after sitting in traffic for an hour to go about five miles. Some of these games have, indeed, been real stinkers. (Which is par for the course for every sporting event — not everything can be a classic.) And there are genuine questions about the weirdness of the United States hosting this tournament at all. It’s not perfect. 

But nothing about modern sports is quite perfect. Not when we sit in billion dollar stadiums too often built for billionaires on the backs of people who, once the towers of concrete and steel are erected, suddenly can’t afford tickets to see their favorite team. Not when those stadiums feature gleaming corporate logos plastered on every available square inch of surface, their lights glowing benevolently over 70,000 spectators. Not when our leagues and our tournaments all feature some degree of corruption and money trumping all else, when money trumps all else in our modern world.

What is perfect, though, is the moment the ball ripples the back of the net. When a press box sworn to stony silence breaks out into oohs and aahs at an audacious spin move. And when a fast food restaurant is working triple time, cranking out greasy burger after greasy burger, to appease a peaceful crowd of hundreds of people, brought to the same strange spot by the beautiful game.

Don’t burn those tickets.