The atmosphere in Palmarejo, a middle-class neighborhood in Praia, the capital of the tiny country of Cape Verde, was electric after the country’s World Cup elimination match on Friday against Argentina.
People jumped onto cars in wild celebration. Drivers honked their horns. Crowds waved flags and music blasted away from the bars.
As it happened, Cape Verde lost, 3-2, ending its World Cup dreams.
The celebratory atmosphere might have felt misplaced, but for residents here, there was still an enormous sense of accomplishment in having advanced to the first elimination round after the group stage and finding a space in the global spotlight.
“We won despite losing because we have gone very far — more than anyone expected,” said Romina Delgado, 38, a banker.
Residents of Cape Verde live what they like to call a “No Stress” way of life, a calm, easygoing philosophy rooted in the belief that everything will naturally run its course and find its rhythm.
The notion of a stress-free life briefly went out the window on Friday when Cape Verde astonishingly found itself in extra time, pushing Argentina, the defending champions, to the brink.
Twice, Argentina took the lead. And, twice, Cape Verde came back to even the score, including once in extra time, raising the possibility of one of the greatest upsets the sport had ever seen. In the end, it was too much to ask, and Argentina survived, thanks to an own goal after a misplaced header from a Cape Verde defender, but that did not diminish what Cape Verde had accomplished.
Argentina entered the match as one of the strongest teams in the tournament, led by Lionel Messi, a global superstar and one of the greatest players ever to kick a ball.
On the other hand, Cape Verde — the team and the country — was a total mystery to most global soccer fans. An archipelago off the coast of West Africa with a population of about 500,000, it was making its first World Cup appearance with a team cobbled together from a diaspora of players.
Throughout the match — shown at a fan zone on the beaches of Quebra Canela, an upscale Praia neighborhood that is home to restaurants, bars and foreign embassies — Ms. Delgado had been glued to her chair with her hands over her mouth, praying and rocking anxiously back and forth. Her 10-year-old son kept asking her when Cape Verde would score again.
As she got up to leave, holding her son’s hand, the fans who flooded the fan zone danced beneath the giant televisions. She said she would enroll her son in a soccer academy this year so he could finish the job that had been started.
“Write this down,” she said. “One day, it will happen. He’s very determined, he’s very eager.”
If Cape Verde was a huge underdog, it refused to play the part. Its fairy-tale run was perhaps best demonstrated in the spectacular performance and showmanship of its goalkeeper, Josimar José Évora Dias, better known as Vozinha.
Vozinha made several brilliant saves, but beyond that, he played with a confident flair, casually dribbling past attacking forwards in his own penalty box, and the fans loved it.
“We know Vozinha very well,” said David Ramos, a math professor in Cape Verde, when asked about some of those nerve-racking moments. “We were not nervous. We know him very well. What he did was beautiful.”
Now, it is time to look ahead, and the next chapter, Mr. Ramos said, is to conquer African soccer. “I think African teams are afraid of us now,” he said.
