Tuesday, July 4, 2006 | 7:23 a.m.
It was like going to two funerals in as many days.
One by one, mostly women, and then a few guys, began filing out of Inka Torero. Only an hour earlier, the restaurant, on Buffalo Drive between Tropicana Avenue and Flamingo Road, had been a thriving mass of beer, Brazilian beauty and, yes, samba.
But now the expatriates sat on a curb outside in tears.
Brazil's 1-0 loss to France on Saturday, following Argentina's exit Friday from the World Cup at the hands of Germany, left the world's most popular sporting event facing an all-European final for the first time in a quarter century.
A day earlier, an apoplectic Argentine tried to explain to someone on his cell phone why it was imperative that his team win: "We're the last team from a Spanish-speaking country in the Cup!" he sputtered.
With Brazil's Portuguese-speaking squad, the last South American team fell. So now there's no more "beautiful game" - a Brazilian phrase, but a style of play you can see throughout the continent. And if style of play reflects a culture's world view, then jogo bonito shows the Latin passion for things magical, pleasing to the eye, inexplicable to the mind.
After the loss Saturday, Brazil's O Globo, a major daily, was quoted in the U.S. as deriding its team for playing "without fun, without life, without joy, without personality, without the Brazilian way of playing."
Much has been said over the years about process versus results, the bonito versus the practico, and how the best Latin teams achieve victory with an aesthetic flair, while such teams as, say, Germany, win with pure strategy and teamwork.
As the elimination phases of the tournament progressed during the last three weeks, and other Latin American teams fell by the wayside, millions of Hispanics across the globe had been pulling for Argentina and Brazil.
The Spanish-language television station, Univision, made no attempt to be impartial. Before transmitting games that featured a Latin team, the station's studio was transformed into a party from that country - mariachis for Mexico, samba for Brazil and so on.
Perhaps unexpectedly, blogs in the tournament's first week buzzed with criticism of ESPN and ABC's coverage of the soccer fest.
Many bloggers confessed to switching to Univision, despite not understanding Spanish, because they preferred the passion of its announcers to what they called the inexperience and ignorance of American announcers when it came to the game.
Now that's all over.
I've been fortunate to spend the last few weeks with members of different local immigrant communities as they followed their teams on the screen, for a series of stories portraying those communities.
I remember what a Brazilian woman told me in the ebullience following one of her team's early victories. She said she had spent a few hours "feeling like I'm in Brazil."
Asked to elaborate, she said she had been able to dance, jump up and down and move around a packed restaurant freely without worrying about bumping into someone and having to excuse herself. She was talking about cultural touchstones - music, body language, physical space.
This week, I suppose she's back at work selling time shares.
For thousands of fellow Latin immigrants, it's business as usual in the Las Vegas Valley, now that their teams are out of the World Cup.
Perhaps just a little less bonito.
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