While we were in Rosario, we made the pilgrimage to the place where Messi was born, 525 Estado de Israel, a house in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. Messi doesn’t live there anymore — apparently nobody does — but his family still owns it, and it clearly means something to him. Next door, we ran into a neighbor who has lived on Messi’s street for more than 40 years. When we asked if Messi was always out in the street chasing a ball around, he held his hand at his waist to indicate Messi’s height and then gave us a Bronx cheer to signal the general inanity of our question. Of course he was. For some reason, that one short moment made Messi’s existence feel real in a way that we hadn’t yet experienced in Argentina. He lived here, he played in these streets before anybody knew who he was. Now it has become this complicated psychological puzzle: Argentina needs him, he needs Argentina and the debts seem unsatisfiable. Messi rarely says anything revealing, but for an instant we could feel him here, this tiny boy with a talent so big it could fly him across the ocean at the vulnerable age of 13. This boy who rejected the advances of Spain’s national team to choose Argentina, the land of his birth, only to find that he could never really come home.

There are always surprise stories at the World Cup, but Argentina has an easy draw in the group stage and should make the round of 16 without trouble. Barring injury, Messi will have his moment. On the field, he handles adversity well. When he gets hit, he gets back up, and he rarely makes a show of it; in a game sometimes disdained for operatic dives and melodramatic appeals to the referee, Messi rarely avails himself of either. Often, during his long arcing runs toward the goal, defenders come at him with the clear intention of cutting his legs out from under him, only to have the attempt somehow absorbed by the low-slung churn of Messi’s stride. He doesn’t want the foul to be called, because he is feeling it and wants to keep going. At times, he seems almost to grow new legs in midair.

Off the field, he’s not as nimble or resilient. Some of the criticism clearly gets to him. When he arrived home to begin training for the World Cup in May, he couldn’t make it out of the airport before people started questioning his knowledge of Argentina. He has always preferred to let his play speak for him, and this month may be his best and final chance to show the skeptics at home that he is worthy of the shirt. His place in history depends on it. “Here, we justify or condemn based on whether the ball went into the net or not,” the writer Eduardo Sacheri told me. “Messi is incognito, incognito until the result speaks.”