And perhaps that is where a lesson hides, one our debates on identity and immigration often forget. For years, Quebec has asked newcomers to take an interest in its language, its culture and its collective references. Many do so naturally. This season again, around the Montreal Canadiens, people from every corner of the world learned the players' names, followed the playoffs and shared the emotions of an entire province.
No one made them do it.
No law was passed to teach them to love hockey. No program was created to explain to them why an overtime goal can make a whole neighbourhood explode with joy.
They did it because human beings have a remarkable capacity: to adopt new reference points without giving up the ones they already carry.
And during the World Cup, the movement runs the other way.
Quebecers who never watch soccer will suddenly follow Morocco's run, or Senegal's, or Haiti's. Colleagues and neighbours will explain offside to those who do not yet understand it. Some will nod without being entirely convinced. Then they will end up grasping the rules of the game. Exactly as so many newcomers have had to learn what an icing call is in hockey.
What is fascinating is that no one sees this as a threat.
Taking an interest in Senegal does not make you less of a Quebecer. Cheering for Morocco does not make the fleurdelisé disappear.
On the contrary, the collective experience widens.
Sport does not settle the debates on identity, integration or immigration. But sport shows something our public arguments sometimes forget: taking an interest in the other does not erase who we are.
At the heart of this World Cup there is one telling image. A few years ago, a young boy born in Abidjan arrives in Montreal with his mother. He grows up in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, develops at CS Saint-Laurent and then at CF Montréal, before reaching Europe's top leagues.
Today, Ismaël Koné will wear Canada's colours in front of the whole world.
His path does not put an end to the debates. It simply recalls a very Quebec reality: it is possible to arrive from elsewhere and become fully from here.
For a few weeks, Quebecers will do exactly what so many immigrants have done before them: take an interest in a collective passion that was not theirs to begin with. And they may discover what sport seems to have understood long ago: a strong culture is not one that fears the encounter. It is one confident enough to welcome it.
