Ever since I was four years old, I remember my parents telling me that I’d be great at French. One day, when I was going to be a little bigger, and then a grown-up, I would be speaking fluent French like there was no tomorrow. Or demain.

The reason they told me that wasn’t because our little three-person unit in Helsinki was especially France loving or sophisticated. They told me that simply because I couldn’t roll the r’s in a Finnish way, but instead, let them roll deep in my throat.

One day I could turn that into an asset, they assured me. This is a story of that day.

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Last night, just before Riccardo Montolivo was about to shoot his penalty kick in Italy’s Euro2012 semifinal against England, I told Wife that he was going to miss it.

“You can see the fear in his eyes,” I told her. “He’s never going to score.”

Montolivo missed the goal by a half a meter.

“Told you so,” said the man in the armchair. Me.

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When I was nine years old, my favorite football club in the world, the one that I dreamed of one day playing for, was the New York Cosmos. The reason was obvious. The Cosmos had Pelé, and everybody knew he was the best player in the world. If the Cosmos wouldn’t sign me, I wanted to play for Santos, Pelé’s club in Brazil.

He had just retired, though, but even if I may have known that, it didn’t bother me because my father worked at an appliance store that sold this new invention called a video recorder.

On one of those mysterious black boxes called video recording cassettes, he had recorded a show that told me the story of Pelé, all the way from Edson Arantes do Nascimento’s childhood in poor Brazil to his heroics in the World Cup, to his 1000th goal, to his seven-million dollar contract with the Cosmos, and to his last game in New York, against Santos.

In my head, while shooting a ball against the wall of our apartment building, I was Pelé, but as we all know, just as important as the images in your head is the image you portray to the world.

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Maybe it was because my father had been a good Finnish baseball player, and had even been on the winning team of an all-Finland sports camp back in the day, or maybe it was just because I was pretty good at catching the ball in pesäpallo, but I always thought I’d be great at baseball.

So when a teammate once told me after a hockey practice that he played baseball in the Finnish league, I said I wanted to play, too.

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