Brazil is, again, the sentimental favourite

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Imagine the Summit Series had gone very differently.

Assume that Canada had whipped the Soviets at the outset. Think of the expectation that would have created. Then picture Canada coming home and falling apart in the final three games.

Now envision a world in which that defeat defined the parameters of hockey in this country. Every time we won after that – no matter how many victories on foreign soil – people would point back at the humiliation of 1972 and say, 'It doesn't count until we right that wrong at home.'

Your guide to the Olympic Games: What you need to know today

That's what the Maracanazo is to Brazilians. In some small way, this entire Olympic adventure has been an attempt to undo its now twice-suffered curse.

The Maracanazo – very roughly speaking, 'Disaster at the Maracana' – refers to the championship game of the 1950 World Cup. That tournament was the first held in Brazil. Brazilians assumed they'd win it easily. They fell 2-1 to Uruguay in the final.

The loss was hung on goalkeeper Moacir Barbosa. His name became a popular synonym for 'loser.' When they gave Barbosa the goal posts from the Maracana as a retirement gift many years later, he took them home and burned them in his backyard.

The Maracanazo is Brazil's twisted Woodstock. More than 200,000 fans were wedged into the Maracana stadium. Since many of them sneaked in, tens of thousands more would later claim to have been on hand.

There are (almost certainly apocryphal) stories of people throwing themselves in despair from the upper tiers once it ended. Nearly 200 people were treated on site for "fits of hysteria." It was a single game that scarred a national psyche.

In the mid-1950s, Brazil began its recovery by reconfiguring the world's soccer imagination. Others might occasionally win, but once people got a look at a teenage Pele, no one was ever again going to out-Brazil Brazil.

Pele, Garrincha, Ronaldo, Zico, et al. Just the mention of those names summoned up mental images of a very specific sort of soccer – the game as art. Fluidity, creativity and something very like kinetic perfection. Watching them play was as close as sport gets to romance.

By the '70s, a global pattern had been set. You pulled for your own national team. Once it was out, you rooted for Brazil. It was everyone's not-so-secret soccer crush.

When Brazil was awarded the Rio Olympics in 2009, that feeling remained in full flower. The senior men's team was ranked second in the world. The national focus was entirely concentrated on the 2014 World Cup, the first to be held at home since the catastrophe of 1950.

Brazil stuttered badly at South Africa 2010 – the first, faint warning siren. Nevertheless, it was heavily favoured four years later.

Rio was alight during that tournament in a way the Olympics could not hope to match. Every time Brazil played, the city did not stop. It quickened.

Everyone poured out of doors. In the moments before Brazil matches, you could not drive the already packed thoroughfares for the number of pedestrians thronging them. People dragged TVs into the street. In favelas, games were projected onto any available flat surface. For Brazilians, watching Brazil was a necessarily communal experience. The city became their theatre.

After wins, they spontaneously lit off enormous fireworks. It would occasionally feel like Rio was being bombarded.

On the night of the semi-final against Germany, the sound hit new deafening crescendos. We've all known that feeling during a big game, when you can hear neighbours through walls or across yards reacting to goals.

In Rio during the early stages of that game, those distant ovations came during every bright move or completed long pass. In your mind's eye, you saw people coming off barstools or out of chairs in anticipation everywhere around you. More than six million people live in Rio and, for a moment, you were connected to every one of them.

Eleven minutes in Germany's Thomas Muller started the scoring. The sound changed – now suddenly keening and nervous – but did not lessen. Then 12 minutes later Germany scored again. And again. And again. And again. Four goals in the game between 23 minutes and 29 minutes.

Half an hour after the start, Rio had fallen completely, eerily silent. Three or four generations post-Maracanazo, it was happening again. This time, it was worse.

Realizing they were now tromping through an emotional graveyard, the Germans stopped celebrating their tallies. Out on the pitch, they seemed embarrassed for their hosts.

German pity may have been the hardest thing to bear. Here was the legend of Brazilian soccer supremacy – six decades in the making – being atomized in six minutes.

Afterward, Brazil's coach Luis Felipe Scolari would call it "the worst day of my life." Several Brazilian players ended their international careers as penance. The game got its own epithet, the Mineirazo, after the stadium in which it was played.

The outrageous 7-1 loss was perhaps best summed up by a national nemesis, Argentina manager Alejandro Sabella: "Football is illogical."

Brazil has been trying, with little success, to make sense of it since.

If the Games had taken place a decade ago, the Olympic soccer tournament would not matter here. Not in any life-or-death way.

Given that it is designed for under-23 players, the Olympics have never been considered a major soccer event. Winning it confers little glory on any genuine power. In London, Mexico beat Brazil in the men's final. Nobody back home was bothered. It was widely perceived as good experience for a few of the younger stars before playing in the thing that actually counted – the World Cup.

One is reminded of a saying at Ajax of Amsterdam's fabled academy, which features several levels of youth squads leading up to the top professional side: "The senior team must win. All other teams may win."

Brazil has only ever had one must-win team. That's changed in a couple of ways.

The most laudable side-effect of the men's failure is that Brazil's senior women's team was, for the first time, given some real attention here. In the past, it has been almost entirely ignored.

An example of the general attitude: In 2011, Santos FC was having trouble paying Neymar's salary. Its solution? Shutter the women's team. That saved it $600,000 a year – about what Neymar made in a month.

Ten years ago, Brazil's captain, Marta, was the best player in the game, and probably the best of all time. As per the hopeful usual, a great deal is made of her example, but with little actual result.

According to a 2014 FIFA survey, there are 24,000 registered female players in all of South America. In Canada, that number is about 400,000.

The Olympics was supposed to be the changing of that. It looked good early, until Brazil was derailed by Sweden. Then it had to play Canada.

Back home, we rate our women's team. Down here, they're nobodies. Actually, it's worse than that – they're Canadians.

(When Marta was asked to rattle off the major competition at last year's World Cup, she listed five countries. You'd assume that as hosts and defending Olympic medalists, we would be one of them. We were not.)

When Canada scored first at the Arena Corinthians on Friday, the crowd didn't know what to do with that information. Most decided to do nothing. Ho hum. They just pressed on at a low, pleasant buzz.

Brazil lost – that's becoming familiar. After it ended, the crowd cheered the winning Canadian side. It's good manners, but it's not the done thing. This wasn't a Brazilian soccer crowd. It was an Olympic crowd. There's a big difference.

Whatever Brazil's result on Friday, it was only going to heap pressure on the men's team. Every Brazilian victory or loss at this Olympics – no matter how small or large, no matter what the event – only tends to point down the road to Saturday's men's final. That game will be the measure of how Brazil did at Rio 2016. If not for good, then certainly for ill.

It's indicative of how far it has come down in the world that Brazil currently features only one player who rates mention among the world's very best – Neymar.

Problematically, he plays professionally alongside a better one – Argentina's Lionel Messi. This new notion of perpetual second-best-ism has now attached itself to Brazil like a string of tin cans.

Brazil has become what Spain once was – a decent side that should be much better; a hard-luck case. Neymar is the human embodiment of that decline.

He had one piece of good fortune during the last World Cup – someone broke his back. As a result, he was out injured during the final game and is unsullied by the Mineirazo.

When you walk the streets of Rio, you see many Neymar jerseys. A few Jarizinhos and Rivelinos. You don't see any of the players who were in that semi. They've been disappeared from history.

Under normal circumstances, Neymar might have skipped these Games. They take place in the same summer as the Copa America, a far more meaningful event to South Americans.

When Neymar gave the Copa a pass in favour of the Olympics, that was the first signal. When the team crashed out in the Copa group stages without him, that was the second. Brazil no longer wanted to win here. It had to win.

It started miserably with goalless draws against South Africa and Iraq. The team was jeered off the pitch after that second result. Neymar was singled out for particular attention.

"Sem jogo, sem goal e sem amor," was O Globo's verdict – "No game, no goal and no love."

The country had once again begun spinning down toward despair. It was never going to win on the overall medal table, but to be gazumped at soccer? No, no. Not possible.

One senior Brazilian sports columnist straight-facedly suggested that, on the basis of two games, Marta was now a better player than Neymar. It's a nice, egalitarian thing to say. It's also objectively ridiculous.

It speaks to the delirium Brazil's men's team creates in its closest observers (i.e. 200 million Brazilians). When the men are pretty good, they are the finest team in the country's history. Better than the 1982 version. Better than 1970. Better than the very best there ever was.

Whenever they are average, they are objectively the worst. How do you say, 'Hit the life      boats, people, because this ship is going down' in Portuguese? Because there's no in-between.

Since tying Iraq, Brazil has cruised. It put six by Honduras in the Olympic semi. Neymar scored twice. After the match, several Honduran players asked him for autographs. The local Neymar v. Marta debate dried up rather suddenly.

Realistically, the reconstruction of the Brazilian soccer program is a medium-to-long-term project. It might be competitive at the next World Cup, but it is not going to win it. The next Copa will be played here, but not until 2019.

What Brazil has in the interim is just one game with which to triage its dignity – the Olympic final.

This contest represents the collision of Brazil's two great sporting tragedies – it will be played at the Maracana; and against Germany.

Winning this game won't cure anything. Unlike Brazil, Germany didn't send a single recognizable star to Rio. This side could not even be called Germany 'B'. You'd have to work your way through the alphabet for a good long while to put into perspective how this Germany and the real Germany compare.

By comparison, the Brazilian team represents its strongest possible side in this event format.

So at best for Brazil, this will be a face-saving victory over an ersatz opponent.

It's the worst-case the country will be thinking about.

To lose again to the same country, and this time at the Maracana? That would be inconceivable. You could not speak of it as a new low. This would be hitting the bottom and beginning to tunnel.

"Brazilian football is not yet dead," manager Rogerio Micale said after the Honduras game. "I still believe in Brazilian football."

Perhaps, but the implication is that it is in critical condition. Without this game as its beating heart, there is no sports culture in Brazil. Its decline makes all culture precarious.

This is a country in which a soccer player – that remarkable renaissance man, Socrates – is credited with galvanizing the movement that brought down a military dictatorship. He did it by wearing a t-shirt that read, "I want to vote for my president."

Some countries are good at soccer. Brazil is soccer.

This team is a poor simulacrum of the ones we remember. It may never be that again. But on Saturday, Brazil becomes the world's sentimental favourite for one more day.

Because who could root against a national side that made soccer beautiful for all of us, and now only wants to reclaim a little piece of that legacy for the sake of its own pride?