My first memory of Maradona was his absence. It was the 1998 World Cup, and he wasn’t in the lineup.

Those days, as now, Italian collectibles company Panini and FIFA published every country’s line-up on the pages of a sticker album. Kids like me scraped together coins and small bills to buy packs of stickers with players’ faces on them and complete the set. Of course, you hoped to complete your own country’s first. In my sticker album, I looked at the faces of the Argentine players — Verón, Simeone, Crespo, Zanetti, Batistuta — and I knew, just knew, that this team, and therefore my album, just wouldn’t be as good as it could’ve been, once. There was a missing gleam.

Growing up in Argentina in the 1990s meant constantly teetering on the edge of a precipice you couldn’t really see but were absolutely sure was there. There was the glory of the uno a uno, the handful of years when the Currency Board pegged the Argentine Peso to the American Dollar in an attempt to stabilize inflation and make it easier to participate in the foreign exchange market. This was a strange and specific source of pride for some middle- and working-class Argentines, constantly seeking a strong sense of identity through comparison: if our money was worth as much as theirs, then we were as good as them.