The big game starts in 45 minutes. It's Barcelona versus Milan for a place in the Champions' League finals against Arsenal. The entire city will be watching the match, except for those dorks who make a big deal out of being too intellectual to watch sports. They don't count.

Barça fans, who are most of the city and the region, are all keyed up for the big game. It's the biggest game Barcelona has played since 1994, when it lost the final of the European Cup 4-0 to Milan. There will be an explosion of mass jubilation if the team wins and mass depression for at least a week if they lose.

Soccer is such an amazingly big deal you wouldn't believe it. I have never seen American fans as worked up as the Spaniards get over soccer. I suppose it's because Spain has only one sport, while the US has three and a half. Soccer season lasts nine months a year, and it's the focus of sporting attention the whole time.

FC Barcelona, our boys in red and blue, is "more than just a club," its fans say. It's a tribe, a group loyalty. Most Barça fans identify the club with Catalonia itself, and the team is considered a sort of Catalan national squad, despite the fact that the players are mostly from Brazil and Holland and Argentina and France and Mexico and Cameroon and Portugal and the like. Catalanistas say that during the Franco period the only way they were allowed to express their nationalist feelings were through soccer and Catholicism--the Catalan church is quite nationalist as a general rule.

Real Madrid fans respond that Barça is "more than just a club--it's a puticlub." "Puticlub" is "whorehouse."

Let's see if I can explain this in American baseball terms. Real Madrid is the Yankees, the richest club that always wins, the equivalent of "America's Team." Barcelona is the underdog, the lovable losers (like the '62 Mets) or the scrappers that always get beat because their opponents have more cash (the Brooklyn Dodgers), your Boston Red Sox or your Chicago Cubs, your "wait till next year" teams. (Never mind that the Red Sox are the second richest team in baseball, they're still the underdogs compared to the Yankees.)

Of course I'm a Barça fan. I hate the Yankees.

Let's see. The match starts in exactly twenty-seven minutes.