Moscow

Rewriting history isn’t supposed to be easy.

But from the moment they arrived at the 2018 World Cup, England’s national soccer team had made it look exactly that.

They cruised through the group stage. They breezed into the semifinals. They even found time to cure a deep-seated psychological hangup about penalties with England’s first-ever shootout win at a World Cup.

It was as though England had simply decided to cast off the half-century of heartbreak and humiliation its national team had endured in its quest to recapture the World Cup for the first time since 1966.