Most of the World Cup's group stage matches pass without much drama, but then something breaks open near the knockout rounds.
After about 90 minutes of brilliant football, 11 men on the losing side break down, the stands break down with them, and an entire nation cries along.
One chance, once every four years. Miss it, and there's another four year wait, and for some players, their career simply ends there.
A team can play a flawless ninety minutes, moving with the kind of speed Japan showed, and still a single goal in the dying seconds of extra time becomes the reason a whole nation weeps.
This might be the only stage in the world where men let the weight in their chest fall as tears, without the fear of anyone judging them for it.
It starts young, falling off a bicycle and hearing "boys don't cry" and it ends the same way years later: Men don't cry. Men are compelled to walk around like robots, working, functioning, keeping a smile on when the moment demands it.
Football really is a strange kind of permission slip. Society has turned the male body into a symbol of strength, and maybe the World Cup pitch is the one place where that body is allowed to fall apart without anyone calling it weakness.
When the Japanese players sank to the ground after conceding in the last moment of extra time, nobody in the stands called them soft.
Instead, an entire nation found in that moment its own right to cry with them. That contradiction is what stays with me. Same society, same men, but the moment the context shifts, the meaning of tears shifts too.
That childhood bicycle story is really just the beginning. Later it’s getting hurt on the school field and hearing "why are you crying like a girl?" Or failing an exam and hearing "if you're like this now, what will you do when you grow up?" That is followed by a failed relationship being met with friends laughing it off.
Slowly, a boy learns that crying is proof of failure, a signature of weakness. He learns to swallow his tears, to keep a lump permanently lodged in his throat.
Year after year, these lumps pile up until there's a graveyard inside his chest, full of things he was never able to say.
And then one day, on a stage that only comes once every four years, 90 minutes of football tears down every wall. Because here, the reason for losing is obvious, public, something everyone watched happen together.
Here, nobody has to explain their tears. A man crying outside a football pitch has to explain himself first, has to justify it. But a player who loses on the field needs no explanation, his tears are already accepted as valid.
And that acceptance is really the saddest part of all. It means a man's pain only becomes acceptable to society when it has a "logical," visible cause. But most of life's pain doesn't come with such a clear reason.
Depression, loneliness, a broken relationship, the fear of becoming a father, the shame of losing a job, none of these have a stadium, none of these have a crowd willing to cry along. So this pain stays lonely, unspoken.
So the real question becomes this: Are we going to keep waiting for a stage as rare as the World Cup to give men's tears permission to exist?
Or can we build a kind of society where crying in the corner of a room, on a friend's shoulder, or alone in your own space, feels just as natural for a man as Messi's or Neymar's tears on the World Cup field?
Remember those nights during the 2022 World Cup? When Messi cried holding the trophy, boys on the streets of Dhaka, on the rooftops of their mess houses, sitting in front of tea stalls, cried along with him.
And yet these same boys probably couldn't cry openly even at a family member’s death, because "you're the one who has to hold the family together now, stay strong."
Somehow, wearing an Argentina jersey and feeling connected to a stranger's tears a thousand miles away comes easier than admitting the tears sitting inside yourself.
Here I want to add something I've noticed in my own work. Doing journalism, I've heard countless stories: People who lost everything to river erosion, fathers who lost their jobs, men who lost their children. Interviewing them, I've noticed that past a certain age, men look down while speaking, their voice shakes, but they fight with everything they have to hold the tears back.
As if letting them fall would leave the interview incomplete, as if crying itself would become a document of weakness sitting on the recorder.
And yet these same men might go home, sit in front of the television watching a match, and cry silently, because nobody's watching, or if they are, nobody will ask why.
The real problem was never the crying itself, it's the fear of being seen. It's not that men can't cry, it's that if they do, someone might see, and that seeing might turn into judgment.
When an entire stand, an entire nation, is crying together, nobody falls alone, nobody stands alone in front of judgment. The crying becomes collective, and so it becomes safe.
Maybe that's exactly where the solution starts too. If crying alone is what feels frightening, then what we need are small circles, among friends, within families, inside relationships, where a man crying doesn't mean he's left to face it by himself.
Where the question "what happened, tell me" carries no undertone of judgment, only a genuine wish to sit with him.
Maybe every man needs his own small moment where even in losing, even in crying, someone stays standing beside him, not as a judge, but as a supporter in the stands.
The World Cup doesn't teach us that men don't know how to cry, it teaches us that men haven't forgotten how, they're just waiting for permission.
The real question is whether we can build that permission, that safe set of stands, into our everyday lives. Or will we keep waiting once every four years for a trophy to make our tears valid.
Nafew Sajed Joy is a Bangladeshi researcher, writer, and environmentalist whose work sits at the intersection of academia, journalism, and social advocacy.