Vozinha wrote it hours before facing the world champion. It was not a rallying cry: it was a prophecy.
“There will be more than 11 players: it will be an entire people on the field. Because there are no islands. There is no distance. There are no borders. We are one flag.”
And that is how he played. As if behind his gloves he were pushing half a million people, plus the entire diaspora scattered across the world, plus the millions of strangers who in three weeks adopted Cape Verde as their second homeland.
At 40 years old, in his first World Cup, the goalkeeper who learned to make saves by watching videos because on his island there were no goalkeeper coaches, shut down the soul of the greatest player of all time. One, two, three times he said no to Messi, the idol he had dreamed of facing. He stretched the champion’s agony into extra time that no one imagined, and only a deflection, nine minutes from the end, could beat him.
When it was over, he raised his gloves to the sky and applauded his people, drenched, with the look of someone who had given absolutely everything.
He himself had said it: “Hopefully one day children will want to be like a footballer from Cape Verde.” After this World Cup, Vozinha, there is no longer any need to wish for it. Millions of children, in your homeland and everywhere, learned your name.
You were right: there are no islands. Today the whole world was Cape Verde. 
