UNION STATION, 5 P.M. MONDAY — Bashir Belkacemi was strolling along the sidewalk of a downtown Kansas City street Monday evening, his first time here, when he stopped to talk to a local man wearing a collared shirt, slacks and dress shoes.

Five minutes passed, maybe 10, before the two parted ways. Belkacemi’s daughter waited nearby for the conversation to conclude.

“Do you know that guy?” she asked.

“No,” Belkacemi responded.

His daughter, Sabrina, shook her head and smiled.

“Unbelievable.”

It has been years since Belkacemi left New Jersey for a vacation. There are days — weeks, actually — it can be hard for Sabrina to convince him to leave his house. To be frank, she wishes they connected more often, but life gets in the way.

Three decades ago, Belkacemi and his wife fled Algeria to escape the civil war. He left behind his parents and siblings but couldn’t leave behind his heritage. So Sabrina surprised him with tickets to watch the team he’s loved for 61 years but never seen in person: the Algeria men’s national soccer team.

They’re here now, in Kansas City, for the World Cup.

He’s here for more. He’s here for the experience.

Belkacemi has been in his element all week— an element his daughter didn’t even realize he had.

“He talks to every single person he sees on the street. He’ll strike up a conversation with them for 20 minutes and tell them his whole life story,” she said. “And everyone here is so hospitable that they will listen. And that’s what I love about this city and their people.”

This is the soul of the World Cup in Kansas City — or at least everything the World Cup in Kansas City can be.

These moments — these feelings — have been sprinkled throughout the city during the opening week of the tournament. They’re exemplary of the inviting nature of people who comprise a place otherwise still plagued by gun violence and currently in the midst of a literal manhunt.

This era of social media and national political rhetoric accentuate everyday differences. The interactions across Kansas City have been born not from digging for the similarities, but from merely assuming they exist.

It won’t take you long to find the examples.

Just 24 hours.

OK, technically maybe 26.

WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK, 5:30 P.M. — The Algerian rally Monday marched from Union Station to Washington Square Park, vuvuzelas blaring, streamers streaking.

As fans crossed Main Street downtown, vehicles with Algerian flags honked their horns. Americans, presumably Kansas Citians, honked in return.

In the middle of the party, Ahmed Ouamrane waved a green and white Algerian flag. What’s struck him most, he said, is the way Kansas City, same as nearby Lawrence, has “embraced our team and fans.”

“It doesn’t feel like we’re the (road) team,” he said. “I’m feeling home right now.”

Home.

He’s been away for six years, moving to Johnson County in late 2020 to attend school and become an electrician. He’s alone there, his parents, twin sister, seven siblings and his wife unable to travel because of tightening immigration restrictions. It’s a desolate feeling, isolating enough to contemplate moving back home.

Instead, home came to him.

“I need to take this month as vacation,” he said. “I need to do this every day.”

MILL CREEK PARK, 7 P.M. — Walk three miles south of Washington Square Park, and you hear the chants before you see their origin. You feel the drumbeat.

Three top-10 teams — The Netherlands, England and defending champion Argentina — opted to set up their base camps in Kansas City; Algeria is stationed in nearby Lawrence, Kansas.

There were hundreds of Algeria fans.

There are tens of thousands from Argentina. A day before Lionel Messi recorded his first World Cup hat track in a 3-0 win against Algeria at Kansas City (Arrowhead) Stadium, Argentina fans built a shrine to him at Mill Creek Park just off the Country Club Plaza.

He is not simply their favorite soccer player — he is the savior within their religion. And Argentina brought its church to Kansas City.

Well, with one exception, Argentina fan Javier Krumm told me.

“Sometimes you miss church.”

Krumm and his wife, Heidi, traveled here from Los Angeles, but he lived in Argentina until he was 29. At one point Monday, he left the interview after someone had tapped him on the shoulder.

It was a childhood friend — from Argentina.

It can feel like the entire country is here.

And Kansas Citians have joined them. In the middle of the flag-waving chaos, Tom Bridges, from Kansas City, hopped up and down with the crowd as though he was in a mosh pit.

“I couldn’t tell you what they were saying,” Bridges said. “But I was singing it, too.”

LAWRENCE DOUBLETREE, 9:50 P.M. — David Boukersi last saw Algeria play in 1982, a 2-1 win in the town that raised him. The Algerians would go on to beat West Germany in the World Cup that year, a considerable upset.

Boukersi left Algeria for New York shortly afterward. He was just 19. And alone.

So eager for the chance to see his country play again, he left Washington Square Park at dusk Monday and traveled to Lawrence. A college town might be the smallest host city in the dance, but it’s been the first to provide its guests the music.

The college basketball team at KU has developed a cult following over the last century.

The Algerian soccer team developed one in about a half-second.

Downtown Lawrence is decorated with signs and red and green lights, an homage to Algeria’s colors. The university built a gigantic Algerian flag on the grass outside the Lied Center, chopping down some weeds to make room. The wheelbarrow for the red mulch and collection of bricks still sits outside.

It’s not about the symbols, though.

It’s about the people.

They stood on the highway deep into the night to greet the Algerian national team’s arrival. The University of Kansas band played the Algerian national anthem at the team’s first practice, which Lawrence jam-packed with local families.

“That gave me goosebumps,” Algeria head coach Valdimir Petković said.

An African nation bounded by the coast of the Mediterranean Sea to its north has prospered a kinship in a town located in a state literally smack-dab in the middle of America — a town whose new college football stadium is accented by light towers made to represent wheat.

It’s more odd couple than neat fit, but nobody bothered to tell either side. The loudest voices and largest gatherings subtracted any pre-conceived notions, fixating instead on their similarities:

Fandom.

Joy.

They have it in spades, each of them. A collection of KU students will camp out for tickets to watch a basketball game inside Allen Fieldhouse.

Boukersi stood outside the Algeria team hotel near 10 p.m., after a long day of travel, for the chance to see the squad he last saw 44 years ago.

As their counterparts across the country picked luxury hotels, Algeria, which is practicing at Rock Chalk Park, is staying next door to a smoke shop. A gas station with slot machines stands just two doors away.

It’s not the surroundings on which Boukersi concentrates. When he arrived in Long Island, New York at age 19, he knew virtually no one. He found almost no other Algerians. He didn’t have the assistance of social media. It was as though, he said, he didn’t belong.

On a Monday night in Lawrence, Kansas, outside a DoubleTree hotel a couple of hundred feet from the smoke shop, he belongs.

“I need to retire,” he said, “so I can come live here.”

ARROWHEAD STADIUM, 6:30 P.M. — Fabian Ciarloddi and Gustavo Carmona make this a regular thing, traveling from Argentina to watch their team compete in the World Cup. They saw Argentina lift the Cup in Qatar four years ago.

You know what’s funny? They don’t even characterize themselves as the most fanatic of followers. That’s how big the game is back in Argentina.

They come for a different reason: Friends.

There were four of them together here in Kansas City, watching Argentina beat Algeria 3-0 on Tuesday behind a hat trick from Lionel Messi.

They plan their holidays a week or two in advance. They planned the logistics of this trip seven months ago.

“This is one of the few things,” Ciarloddi said, “that joins Argentina together.”

There’s some symbolism from the spot in which Ciarloddi made that point: He was standing inside the Chiefs Hall of Fame on the lower concourse of Arrowhead Stadium.

There is the relation, right?

Isn’t that what the Chiefs provide?

There were plenty who believed Kansas City shouldn’t be playing host to World Cup matches — let alone six of them, including a quarterfinal that could send Argentina back to Arrowhead in a few weeks. An opening-night traffic mess probably bolstered their argument.

But here, from the bid to the base camp sales pitches to the opening week of the tournament, Kansas City has made it clear:

Their planned points of connection are about more than the wins and the losses. They are greater than the sport.

It’s the connection itself that matters.

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