Devastated: Brazilian fans react on Rio's Copacabana beach. Photo: Getty Images
Sao Paulo: The morning after the evening before and the sun rose in Belo Horizonte. But the city's image will never be the same, forever now inextricably linked with the biggest disaster in Brazilian sport.
Brazilian football fans virtually everyone in this nation of 200 million for whom the game remains as much a national signifier as it is a sport were only beginning to come to terms with the horror of the Selecao's extraordinary 7-1 loss to Germany in the World Cup semi-final.
The tears of shame in the stadium and the cries of impotence as the Germans piled on goal after goal, the pictures of dejected fans covering their heads in horror and little children tearful with bemused incomprehension had already been beamed around the world.
Early goal: Thomas Mueller put Germany in front. Photo: Reuters
These, of course, are easy sells and the obvious shots, fitting in with a pre-ordained narrative that the country would collapse if Brazil did not win the World Cup.
It was important to the millions here that their country did well, but it must be said that the reaction generally has been much better than many feared.
While there were reports of gunfire and crowd trouble in Rio following the extraordinary collapse and some trouble in parts of other cities there has been no mass hysteria.
David Luiz is consoled by teammate Thiago Silva. Photo: Reuters
Cab drivers - at least the one who brought me to the airport at 6am on Wednesday morning for a shuttle between Belo Horizonte and Sao Paulo for the other semi final - could only shrug and laugh about it. Waiters in restaurants feigned shock and horror late on Tuesday night, but got on with delivering drinks and late-night suppers.
The cabin crew on the flight kept smiling too, although when the tourists all start flying out next week serious questions about the $11 billion the country has spent on putting on a World Cup when other such enormous challenges confront it will doubtless be raised forcibly.
As Brazilian coach Luiz Felipe Scolari said in the wake of the defeat, life goes on. Football is important in Brazil, but it is not the be all and end all; there are, after all, more pressing social, economic and employment issues to worry about in the cold light of day.
Worst day of his life: Brazil's coach Luiz Felipe Scolari. Photo: AFP
Nevertheless there will still be a football reckoning, the attempt to understand what was not just a collapse but a complete capitulation in a game that ceased to be a contest once Germany had taken an 11th-minute lead.
One Brazilian journalist declared with conviction as he sat net to me on the flight to the game between The Netherlands and Argentina that the result was the greatest embarrassment in world sport. In any sport, at any time, for any country.
No American defeat in ice hockey or one of its other dominant sports, no All Blacks loss in rugby, no England humbling at home in cricket could ever have been more shameful, was what he was suggesting.
Certainly his peers in the Brazilian media agreed that the events in Belo Horizote were simply too awful to be fully comprehend immediately, although that, of course, didn't stop them trying.
One Rio daily employed black humour to sum up the mood of the nation.
It ran a huge picture of the winning goal in the 1950 World Cup final in Rio, when Uruguay stunned Brazil by beating them in the final, with a headline saying ''Congratulations'' _ reporting how the disaster in Belo Horizonte had now overtaken the nightmare in the Maracana as the worst incident in Brazilian football history. The ghosts of 1950 could now, for the players involved then, be exorcised, the paper said gleefully.
Purging the memory of this horror show will not be easy for the players involved this time. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and a plethora of social media mean their collapse will be preserved digitally, available to all at the touch of a pad, for ever. No amount of pleading with Google to remove the incriminating evidence will have any effect.
This loss, in the Estadio Mineirao, has quickly been dubbed the Mineiraco, and bizarre it was to witness. More bizzare in some ways was the fact that many Brazilian fans stood up to applaud the Germans when their seventh goal went in - an overt acknowledgement that their own side was a shambles compared to a slick, organised, disciplined and skilful Germany.
Questions will now be asked about the whole structure of Brazilian football.
There is widespread corruption reported in the game. Crowds are poor by the standards of the big European leagues.
Players emerge from poverty, largely self-taught on the street corners of the cities and in the favelas. But there is enormous wastage as so much talent is left to its own devices and not properly nurtured.
While some of the bigger Brazilian clubs do have academies and development set ups, my Brazilian colleague explained, they are few in number compared to the number of players in this country, and they are a long way behind the standards of European clubs.
Too many Brazilian players also leave their homeland too early, he said, moved on by agents who have bought a controlling stake in them as an ''economic entity''.
In the past 30 years the best have always gone to Europe, but they tended to leave when they were in their early to mid 20s, having established themselves as mature professionals back home, having grown up a bit. Now they leave as teenagers, prodigious, talented, precocious teenagers, but not mature and few having nurtured the life skills they need to survive.
''There is so much that needs to be done here. We have all these players in big teams overseas, but they are no longer the stars. They are the supporting players. Twenty years ago, Brazilians were the men in the team who made a difference, not now. This was terrible, the worst humiliation in sporting history. Let us hope that things might change.''
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