N.J.’s World Cup party was such a drag. Thanks, Norway, for rowing to our rescue

The World Cup is expensive. The World Cup is snarled roadways. The World Cup is $98 NJ Transit tickets, and bickering with our New York neighbors, and five weeks with our regularly scheduled lives thrown into a blender. Or, at least, that’s how I felt at 6:01 p.m. on Monday when a man from Norway grabbed me in the MetLife Stadium parking lot and unofficially changed my citizenship.

“You are one of US now!” he announced.

We had just watched a few hundred of his — er, our — fellow countrymen sit near the muddy backstretch of the Meadowlands Racetrack to row an imaginary boat in the pouring rain. This is something Norway fans have done on escalators, in Times Square, even on one of our unglamorous commuter trains from Secaucus. As cool as the social media videos look, the vibe is much, much wilder in person.

“RO!” they yelled in unison after the bang of a drum, with the cadence quickening after a few pulls of their invisible oars.

Then, the ritualized rowing complete, the fans rose to their feet and started marching toward the stadium — a parade that, almost immediately, was stopped by a state trooper to let a few buses pass.

To pass the time during our brief delay, Eivind Kalve belted out the first few words of the Norwegian national anthem — Ja, vi elsker dette landet/Yes, we love this country — and everyone around us joined him. Kalve’s bearded face was painted red and blue for the Norwegian flag, and his patriotic look was completed with — what else? — a viking helmet perched on his head.

“(The World Cup) is all about community,” my new Norwegian BFF told me as we slowly marched to the stadium with about 5,000 similarly dressed fans. “It is all about the passion, nationality, football, life — it is everything. We love it. We love it.

I told him that, perhaps, it could be a wee bit better. We were walking in the pouring rain, after all, through a New Jersey swamp to a stadium that looks like a giant air conditioning unit. The man from Bergen — not the county in New Jersey, but the city on the Norwegian coast — just laughed.

“The rain, I must say, that amuses us,” Kalve said. “Where we are from, in Bergen, it rains 260 days a year — and that’s a good year! We love it. We love it.

I wasn’t about to argue with him. He was, after all, the one with the horned helmet.

But for the first week and a half of this event, it felt like everyone else on the continent was having more fun with the World Cup than New Jersey. Where was the fun and frivolity that seemingly had taken over the other 15 host sites?

In Boston, the Tartan Army of Scottish fans drank a few of the city’s bars completely dry and decorated many of its statues with traffic cones. In Houston, tens of thousands of Dutch fans danced as they marched through the streets during their famous “Oranje Walk.” In Dallas, a Japanese fan went viral when he admitted that he couldn’t speak English during a TV interview before successfully summarizing how most of the 8.3 billion people on the planet are feeling about this quadrennial event right now.

“I … AM … EXCITED!” he yelled.

Here, in New Jersey, we were stuck talking about those expensive train tickets, our traffic-snarled mega mall and the less-than-stellar quality of the stadium’s playing surface. I thought the games would make everyone forget about the often contentious lead-in to the event, but so far, we have had lousy luck on that front, too.

Brazil and Morocco played to a 1-1 draw in the first match at MetLife Stadium, a result that left even Brazilian fans with a little less bounce in their samba steps. France beat Senegal, 3-1, in the second match here thanks to two goals from superstar Kylian Mbappe, but the overall atmosphere felt a little … Le Meh.

Meanwhile, in Kansas City and Dallas, they were gasping about Argentina star Lionel Messi’s assault on the World Cup record book. In Miami and Atlanta, they were boarding the Cape Verde bandwagon and enjoying one of the World Cup’s greatest Cinderella stories. And, in Seattle and Los Angeles, they were wondering if suddenly prolific host team — the old U.S. of A. — could turn the nation’s 250th birthday into a most unexpected kind of summer-long celebration.

We needed a little flavor of the World Cup. We needed a little bit of the fun.

“We have not been in the World Cup for 28 years,” Kalve said. “There’s a lot of feelings compressed, and now we have the opportunity to show ourselves to the world. We are very proud but also humble that we get to have this opportunity.”

The humble fans went berserk when, late in the first half, Marcus Holmgren Pedersen banged a shot off the elbow of the Senegal goaltender and into the net for a 1-0 lead. Then, when the country’s pony-tailed superstar, Erling Haaland, scored twice in first 13 minutes of the second half — one with his left foot, one with his right — the party was truly underway.

Even a surprising Senegal goal in stoppage time couldn’t spoil the fun. The 3-2 win means Norway will advance to the knockout round — and, with a win over France in its next game, a return trip to East Rutherford. The Norway players celebrated with their fans in the most perfect way, sitting on the turf in a neat formation as they grabbed their imaginary oars and went to work.

For one night, no one was complaining about the train tickets, the traffic or the rain. The spirit of the World Cup finally had made its way from the rest of the continent across New Jersey borders, and let the record show, it arrived on an invisible viking ship.

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