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Last Wednesday, members of Congress who can’t even agree on what to order for lunch laced up cleats at Audi Field and, by every account, had the time of their lives.

Republicans and Democrats on the same grass, chasing the same ball, pretending for a couple of hours that the other side wasn’t the enemy. Call it a miracle.

Also, call it a warm-up act. Because the main event starts Thursday — and Washington, D.C. won’t host a single minute of it.

When FIFA divvied up the 2026 World Cup, the District and Baltimore made their pitch and got turned away. The closest you’ll get to a live match is a drive up I-95 to Philadelphia or the trek to MetLife Stadium in the Jersey swamp, which somehow landed the final on July 19.

“We tried,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said of the failed bid, which is the civic equivalent of a shrug.

Sixteen host cities across three countries — and the capital of the United States isn’t one of them.

And yet, watch who keeps turning up to talk about this tournament and where they made their names.

Alecko Eskandarian was the MVP of the 2004 MLS Cup — in a D.C. United uniform. Tony Sanneh anchored the United dynasty that won the league’s first two championships in 1996 and 1997. Last month, he was enshrined in the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

The draw that set the entire bracket? Held in December at the Kennedy Center, a Metro ride from the Capitol. For a city that didn’t make the guest list, Washington’s fingerprints are all over this thing.

There’s a thread running through these men (aside from the fact that they each took time to speak with Jose Umaña, who I consistently proclaim as Â鶹¹ÙÍø’s soccer guru) and it leads back to the last time the men’s World Cup touched American soil.

“The ’94 World Cup was a defining moment in my life,” Eskandarian said to Â鶹¹ÙÍø’s Umaña. “It made me dream of being a professional soccer player.”

Back then, the country didn’t even have a top-flight league; he watched one get built, from “10 teams” to “30 clubs across the country and in Canada.”

Alexi Lalas actually played in 1994 and he traces a straight line from that summer to the U.S. Soccer Foundation, the charity behind last week’s game.

“I’m standing here today because of the summer of 1994,” he said.

The lesson for D.C. fans: A home World Cup isn’t a month of soccer. It’s a down payment on the next 30 years.

Which brings us back to Audi Field and to the thing soccer does that almost nothing else in this town can.

“It doesn’t matter to me which side of the aisle I’m technically playing on,” said Stu Holden, the former U.S. midfielder and Fox’s lead analyst, who suited up alongside Lalas.

“This is a sport that brings people together. This isn’t a time to be divisive.”

Lalas put it plainer: for a couple of hours, he said, we get to remember “we’re really not so different.” That’s not naive. It’s the whole proposition.

And no American city is built to deliver on it like this one — a place where, depending on the match, half your neighborhood is suddenly, loudly, gloriously from somewhere else.

So Washington is going to throw the party it was denied a seat at. The National Mall becomes a FIFA Fan Zone from Thursday through the final, stitched into the country’s 250th birthday celebration. D.C. United is running free watch parties at Franklin Park and down in Navy Yard. The bars will be standing room from the group stage on.

Eskandarian is right about where the soul of this tournament lives: “People are going to come together … they’re going to cry when their teams lose, but most importantly, get to experience the beautiful game.”

For most of us, that was always going to happen in a fan zone or a barroom, not a luxury box. D.C. just gets to do it at scale.

Now, I won’t insult you. A fan zone is not a stadium. The money — in the form of the hotels, the broadcasts, the tourists with no price ceiling — is getting spent in Philadelphia and the Meadowlands, not here.

Tickets to the actual matches run from about $60 to nearly $11,000 and even at those prices, demand has been soft enough that thousands of seats are still unsold days before kickoff. The live World Cup was never really built for the city throwing it the warmest welcome.

And there’s a harder truth: A World Cup on American soil in 2026 carries that the watch parties can’t paper over.

Days before kickoff, a Somali referee with a match to work was turned away at the Miami airport.

For a region as international as this one — the same neighborhoods that will pack these fan zones — the question of who feels safe making the trip isn’t abstract.

The “soccer town” badge deserves the same honesty. The trophies we keep pointing to are a quarter-century old and today’s D.C. United is a solid mid-table club, not a juggernaut. Heritage is doing some heavy lifting here.

But heritage is the point. You don’t measure a soccer city by whether FIFA blessed it with a fixture. You measure it by who shows up when there’s nothing on the line — and Washington has been showing up since before half the country could name a single player.

When Lionel Messi and Inter Miami came through in March, United moved the match out of Audi Field and packed a far bigger house. That’s not a city waiting for permission to care.

As for the home team, the optimism is calibrated.

Sanneh likes the “energy” and the “quality.” Holden — who lost his own career to his knees at 30, and knows the price of a wasted window — calls the quarterfinals “the minimum expectation,” a bar the Americans have cleared exactly once in the modern era, in 2002, with Sanneh on the field.

Eskandarian is more measured: quarterfinals, “and after that, anything could happen.” A win over Senegal last week settled some nerves. For Washington, though, the bracket is almost beside the point.

Because the question this summer was never whether the World Cup would come to Washington. It came to the Kennedy Center in December. It came to Audi Field last week, in cleats, wearing both parties’ colors. It comes to the National Mall on Thursday.

Washington didn’t get a match but it got the tournament anyway. And for six weeks, the rest of the country gets to see what this city has quietly known for 30 years.

It’s a soccer town. It always was.

Â鶹¹ÙÍø’s Jose Umana contributed to this column.

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