I’ve been coming to the United States as a journalist for fifteen years. But I’ve never felt the same excitement over here as I did last week, when I was hugging sweaty, beer-chugging strangers after watching Erling Braut Haaland score Norway’s first goal against Iraq in Boston.

I’m a reporter for the Norwegian socialist newspaper Klassekampen (Class Struggle) and I’ve come here both to cover the World Cup and to investigate what is happening in this country. It’s an America where socialists are now elected mayor of New York, wars are ended by capitulation, the Knicks win championships, and MMA is fought on the White House lawn. Most of all, I’m just one of over ten thousand football-mad, Viking-helmet-wearing Norwegians who have come to chase new moments of national euphoria, many of whom have emptied savings accounts and maxed out credit cards to visit the proud birthplace of greedflation and FIFA’s “dynamic pricing.”

It was a price most of us were willing to pay, even if it meant going to a country that many Norwegians had once associated with freedom and security but today, with its Trumps and Thiels, is increasingly perceived as a threat, both to football — through commercialization and ad-driven inventions like water breaks and video-assistant-referee tech — and to the values we once naively believed the United States upheld.