I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but brace yourself, America: The United States—the country that put a man on the moon and a Starbucks on every corner—did not qualify for the 2018 World Cup.

This dark truth may fill you with an overwhelming sense of astonishment, especially when you consider Iran, Panama, and Iceland (population 335,000) are among the teams that did make the cut. That astonishment will only swell when you learn that such traditional powers as Italy, Netherlands, and Chile also crashed out in slapstick style, yet no one has had the entrepreneurial nous to set up a World Cup NIT.

What America's absence does mean is there will be no Landon Donovan–inspired moment of last-minute collective ecstasy; no new heroes forged, as when Tim Howard went all Terry Sawchuk on the entire nation of Belgium; no searing moment of epic failure, akin to striker Chris Wondolowski whiffing in the dying embers of a game with a wide-open goal, and a small fortune in future Wheaties-box endorsements, at his mercy.

Yet I am here to tell you that it does not matter. Yes, the United States' shock loss to regional minnows Trinidad and Tobago last fall means Congress should immediately pass legislation to prevent our soccer team from ever attempting to play two countries at the same time again. But I believe the national failure that loss caused clears the way for this to be the best and most purely enjoyable World Cup of your life. Here's why:

I came of age in England, a nation that prides itself on being the home of football, yet which, despite that, triggered widespread shame and self-loathing by failing to qualify for two World Cups in my youth (Argentina 1978 and the United States 1994). Those tournaments are etched in my memory as the most satisfying I have ever experienced. Liberated from the gnawing anxieties of my own team's inevitable doom, I was free to revel in every second of the tournament, basking in the totality of the great global telenovela that is a World Cup—drinking in every hero, villain, and neck tattoo.

New, exquisite memories will be forged this summer, for sure. The world's two greatest players—Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal and Argentina's Lionel Messi—line up for what will almost certainly be their final tilt at World Cup glory. A clash in styles: Ronaldo, always the exquisite preening show pony, whilst Messi looks as if he has just stumbled innocuously out of his local Supercuts. They will be joined by a third ethereal global star, Mohamed Salah, the 25-year-old Egyptian who has just netted a record-breaking 32 goals in the English Premier League—a season akin to watching Brady Anderson hit 50 home runs for the '96 Orioles, but without the (possible) drugsies.

For added intrigue, all of this is going to go down in Vladimir Putin's Russia. The 64 matches will play out across four different time zones, in 11 cities scattered around the nether regions of the Rogue State, from Yekaterinburg, tucked away in the Urals; to Samara, which rubs up against the border of Kazakhstan; to Saransk in Mordovia, once feared in the Stalin era for its gulag prison camps, now known as the home of freshly minted Russian citizen Gérard Depardieu.

That Russian setting promises to add an air of comedic menace to proceedings if the sensational pre-tournament news stories are any guide. They include the construction of enormous Soviet-style drunk tanks for English fans; the legalization of marijuana, heroin, and cocaine within stadiums if accompanied by proper prescriptions; and a plan to counter the threat of Russian hooligan fans (who, armed with hammers and GoPros, turned Euro 2016 pre-games into war scenes) by deploying Cossack paramilitaries armed with whips on horseback. What could possibly go wrong?