As we flooded out Paris into the streets to celebrate France’s World Cup semifinal victory Tuesday night, I saw, here and there, people wearing jerseys from 1998. They are looser than the ones they sell now, a brighter blue, with a red stripe and a white collar. 周二晚上，我们涌上巴黎的街道，庆祝法国杀入世界杯半决赛，我看到各处的人们身穿着1998年的球衫，比现在出售的更宽松，蓝色更鲜亮，有一条红道，白领子。
On the backs are the names of an older generation of players—Zidane, Thuram, Henry—who in that year won France’s first and only World Cup trophy. I imagined some had been carefully kept in closets for 20 years, maybe just brought out once or twice, waiting for a night like this one. 背后是老一代球员的名字——齐达内、图拉姆、亨利，当年法国第一次也是唯一一次捧起大力神杯。我估计有些球衫在柜子里仔细保存了20年，兴许只拿出来过一两次，只等待着这样的一个夜晚。
With France in the final of the World Cup on Sunday, it feels like almost every conversation somehow winds back to another century, and whether what happened in 1998 will happen again now. Kylian Mbappé, the star striker of the French team, wasn’t even born yet, and neither were many of those who celebrated Tuesday night. But they have grown up hearing, again and again, about those miraculous days, which have come to seem untouchable and irretrievable. 上周日，法国杀入决赛，感觉人们的话里话外都会提起上个世纪，谈论1998年的一幕是否能重演。法国队明星射手基利安·姆巴佩当时还没出生，很多在周二晚上庆祝的人也是如此。但他们在童年反复听人提起那些神奇的日子，感觉难以企及、无法再现。
The moments the younger generation has known when people poured out into the streets have been times of mourning, notably after the November 2015 terrorist attacks. One of the targets that night was the Stade de France, where the 1998 World Cup had been won, and where the French team was playing a friendly match. The bombing of the stadium was foiled, but that night haunts this moment, and the desire for a time of celebration and communion in the streets of Paris. 年轻一代记忆中，人们涌上街头的时刻总在哀悼，特别是2015年11月恐袭之后。其中一个袭击目标就是法兰西体育场，1998年法国在这里赢得世界杯，法国队还在这里踢了一场友谊赛。虽然在体育馆爆炸的计划被挫败了，但那天晚上笼罩着这一时刻，笼罩着人们走上巴黎街头欢庆和分享的渴望。 World Cups are built to create cycles of memory and hope. They offer a predictable structure that creates space for the unpredictable, and they create vertiginous chronologies. England makes it to its first semifinal in 28 years, hoping to get to its first final in 52 years, and then a goal by Croatia erases it all. The numbers are, in a sense, banal. But they are shot through with deep sadness because the time of waiting stretches out over lifetimes, and in most cases even longer. 世界杯就是要创造记忆和希望的循环，它们有着可以预料的结构，却创造出难以预料的空间以及令人眩晕的大事记。英格兰用了28年首次进入半决赛，希望52年来首次进入决赛，但克罗地亚的一粒进球将一切归零。在某种意义上说，这些数字是乏味的，但深沉的悲伤将它们击穿，因为等待可能是一生一世，甚至更久。
The layers of memory at work in France today are particularly powerful. The story of the 1998 World Cup is now legend: A team made up of a diverse cast of characters—a Basque player named Bixente Lizarazu, a Guadeloupean named Lilian Thuram, a child of Algerian immigrants named Zinedine Zidane, a descendent of Kanaks from the French territory of New Caledonia named Christian Karembeu, and more—played joyously and victoriously. Zidane scored two goals against Brazil in the final. 今天法国仍历历在目的记忆片段显得尤其有力。1998年世界杯的故事现在堪为传奇：各路人马组成的队伍——一个叫比森特·利扎拉祖的巴斯克人、一个叫利利安·图拉姆的瓜德罗普人、一个阿尔及利亚移民的孩子齐内丁·齐达内、一个法属新喀里多尼亚卡纳克人的后代克里斯蒂安·卡伦布……不一而足，他们欢乐地踢球，并取得了胜利。当年决赛对巴西，齐达内独中两元。
The victory came in France on July 12, and the three days of celebration that followed ran over the Bastille Day weekend. The only comparison anyone could find was the liberation of Paris in 1944 because of the sense of an opening onto brighter futures, and the ways in which people from all classes and backgrounds merged and melded in the streets. 7月12日法国夺冠，连着法国国庆日，全国大庆三天。唯一可与之相提并论的是1944年巴黎解放，两者都让人感到将迎来更加美好的未来，不同阶层和不同背景的人在街头汇聚融合。
Two years earlier, the French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen had attacked the players, claiming many of them were “foreigners” and complaining that some didn’t sing La Marseillaise before the games, suggesting they didn’t really love France. 两年前，法国极右翼领导人让-玛丽·勒庞攻击球员，说他们许多人是“外国人”，抱怨有些球员比赛前不唱《马赛曲》，她说他们并不真爱法国。
The players themselves responded powerfully in words, but most powerfully by winning in 1998. Their victory was seen as a vindication of the idea that it was precisely thanks to its diversity and its immigrant population that France could be strong and victorious. 球员们用言语强力回击，但最强力的回击是1998年的胜利。他们的胜利是一种证明：恰恰因为多样性和移民，法国才如此强大和不可战胜。
The celebrations in the streets enacted that sense of possibility, with all the groups mixing together in an ebullient embrace, the French flag speaking the stories of players such as Zidane and Thuram as the true story of the country. 街头的庆祝活动让人们对一切皆有可能的信念成为现实，各界人士不分彼此，热情洋溢，相互拥抱，法国的国旗讲述了这个国家的真正故事，他们是齐达内和图拉姆等球员的故事。
Over the next few years, Thuram used his iconic status to speak out eloquently against racism and for more open and human policies on immigration, work that ultimately led him to create a foundation focused on anti-racist education. 几年后，图拉姆用他的偶像地位令人信服地抨击种族主义，支持对移民采取更开明、更人道的政策，这最终让他创立了一个致力于反种族主义教育的基金会。
In 2006, a French team once again led by Zidane and Thuram made it to the World Cup final, then lost after Zidane head-butted an Italian player and was expelled from the game. The gesture became a global meme and symbol that spurred fascinating conversations, and ultimately it only expanded the legend surrounding Zidane. But the pain of that night’s loss haunts this week’s final, a prodding anxiety that something like that might happen again. 2006年，齐达内和图拉姆率领的法国队再次打入世界杯决赛，齐达内头顶意大利球员被罚下场后输掉了比赛。这一举动成为一种全球性文化基因和象征，让人津津乐道，可最终不过拓展了齐达内的传奇。但那晚失败的痛苦依然笼罩着本周的决赛，那是一种扎心的焦虑，恐怕这种事再次发生。
What the team represents—and what at times has continued to earn it virulent racist attacks—is a forcible truth about what France actually is. The team, like the nation, is a global crossroads, a place shaped by hundreds of years of colonial history and migration. That fact of history, which is the foundation for the country’s future, is often overlooked, or dealt with through xenophobic fantasies. 法国队代表的是法国到底是什么的强有力真理，队伍不时仍会遭到恶毒的种族主义攻击。法国队和法国一样处在全球的岔路口，那是数百年殖民历史和迁徙塑造的地方。这一历史事实是国家未来的基石，但它经常遭人轻视，或遭遇仇外的虚假想象。
At the very least, the French team resists that tendency. In victory, it offers the opportunity both to face reality and, through embracing and knowing it, to craft it anew. 至少，法国队抵制那种趋势。法国队用胜利让人们面对这种现实，并通过拥抱和明白现实，重新创造它。
There is one way in which 2018 can never be like 1998. Those days of 20 years ago are all the more reified—a crystallized nostalgia—because of how little they ultimately changed France. Whatever whiff of utopia they offered, the decades since have offered instead ever intense and deepening struggles and conflicts about race and immigration. That knowledge of the limits of what soccer can do will haunt even the most boisterous of celebrations if France wins on Sunday. 2018年有一点和1998年不相同。20年前的日子尤其具象化，那是一种怀旧情绪的体现，因为最终的胜利几乎没有改变法国。无论有多少乌托邦的味道，二十年来，种族和移民问题引发的斗争和冲突日益加剧。如果周日法国取得胜利，人们会明白足球的局限性将笼罩着最喧闹的庆祝。
For now, though, the ending is unwritten. And so we’re left to look for signs. France is meeting Croatia as it did in 1998, though this time in the final. In that game, the defender Lilian Thuram scored two miraculous goals, and after the second he kneeled on the pitch with his hand over his mouth in the pose of a thinker. That story, and that image, long central icons in the fable of 1998, is now being told with a new urgency, as if it offers the promise of another similar victory. 至少现在，尘埃还未落定。我们还在翘首以盼。法国1998年同样遭遇了克罗地亚，尽管这次是在决赛。上一次比赛中，后卫利利安·图拉姆神奇般地独中两元，第二个进球后，他跪在草坪上，手放在嘴上，摆出思想者的姿势。那段经历和那一图景一直是1998年神话中的核心象征，如今再次被提起，好像那承诺了一场相似的胜利。
There’s another good sign: The semifinal win against Belgium was secured by a defender, Samuel Umtiti, who, as Vincent Duluc wrote in the French sports daily L’Équipe, “maintained the French tradition of defenders who score in the semi-final of the World Cup every twenty years.” 另有一个好的迹象：半决赛拿下比利时的功臣是后卫萨穆埃尔·乌姆蒂蒂，文森特·杜鲁克在法国体育日报《球队》上写道，“维护了法国后卫没20年在世界杯半决赛进球的传统”。
We are in the midst of a spiral of history, a repetition with a difference. The intensity of right now is that combination of not knowing what the next turn will be, exactly, while knowing that whatever happens will be epic and extraordinary. 我们正处在历史的螺旋之中，重复却有所不同。现在的紧张气氛是你不知道下一次转折究竟是什么，但知道无论发生了什么，那都将是史诗性和无与伦比的。
All the events that have led up to France being in the final are, in a sense, already written. But they will take on a different meaning, become parts of a new parable, if France wins the World Cup anew on Sunday. 从某种意义上说，所有让法国打入决赛的赛事都已板上钉钉了，但如果法国在周日赢得世界杯，这些比赛将会有不同的意义，成为新寓言的组成部分。
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