Growing up, I identified myself with soccer. And I used soccer to identify myself. I’m from Ecuador and I used to be good at soccer, so at some point I began telling myself that I was good at soccer because I was from Ecuador. I believed this despite the fact that I hadn’t played soccer while living in Ecuador—not any more than I played any of the universal kid inventions like sockball or “throw a rock on the roof”—and my only connection to the sport was that my older male relatives, my grandfather and his brothers and their sons, were known to like soccer. My grandfather had been living in Ohio for decades and you couldn’t watch games on TV back then, so even this foundational fact about him liking soccer was taken mostly on faith. There was no real evidence of soccer heritage in my life, except to the extent that I was able to make it up by saying that I was from Ecuador and my relatives liked soccer. It was a useful bit of self-invention, a lineage I needed to be true.…