I grew up in a small town in Puglia. The days were measured in scraped knees and the slow death of afternoon light. You either rode your bike until your legs gave out, or you played il pallone. The ball.

Don’t call it soccer. What we played had nothing to do with leagues or referees or painted lines or any of the bureaucratic horseshit adults drape over a child’s pleasures to convince themselves the pleasures are serious. We played in the street. The kid who owned the ball was the boss. He made the rules and ended the game when he felt like it. If you didn’t like it, cry me a river.

The teams were a circus. Six-year-olds running around with fifteen-year-olds. Kids whose fathers owned shops, kids whose fathers worked at the factory, kids whose fathers had just stepped off a boat from Tunisia the week before. By the late nineties, southern Italy was filling up with people from everywhere, and our town, which had been more or less the same town since the limestone was quarried, was quietly becoming a different town. Nobody asked our permission. Nobody asked theirs. It was just happening.

There was the usual hesitation at first. There always is. It is the oldest reflex in the human zoo, this sideways look at the stranger, and anyone who tells you they are above it is lying. Then the ball started rolling, and none of it mattered.

This is the thing nobody who hasn’t lived it understands. The game stripped you down to one question: can you play, or can’t you. If the new kid could trap a ball with the outside of his foot and slip a pass through three defenders without looking up, his last name could have been anything. He was on your team or he was on the other team. End of inquiry. The ball did not care if your father owned the butcher’s shop or had crossed the Mediterranean in a leaking boat. It did not care if you were Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, or a card-carrying believer in nothing. When you were threading a pass to the boy at the post — and the post was a denim jacket somebody had thrown in the dust — you were brothers in the play.

Friendships grew out of those games like weeds out of a sidewalk crack. Nobody planted them. We learned to read each other’s bodies before we had words for it. We trusted without doing the math first. When the streetlights came on we went home to different houses, different prayers said over different food, and we thought nothing of it.

There was a boy I’ll call Ahmed. His family had come from somewhere in North Africa. I was eight or nine and I didn’t know where, and I didn’t ask, because at eight or nine that is exactly the kind of question that strikes you as something only a grown-up would waste breath on. On the pitch we were inseparable. We knew where the other one was going to move before he had decided to move there. That is not a metaphor. That is just what happens when two kids play enough ball together.

Then adolescence showed up like a cop at a party. We stopped playing in the squares. The squares themselves were emptying out anyway, as scooters and screens did the patient work of dragging the kids indoors. And along with the games, the friendships built inside the games started to come apart.

I noticed it with Ahmed first. The hellos, once automatic, got hesitant. Then formal. Then pained, as if every nod he gave me cost him something he couldn’t name. Then they stopped. It took me a long time, and I’m not proud of how long, to figure out what had happened. The wedge between us wasn’t made of any particular fight. It was made of a single word. The word was kafir. It hadn’t been there when we ran together along the pavement at twilight. Somewhere in the years between, a hand I never saw had slipped it between us, and it grew, the way a weed grows in a wall, until the wall started to give.

I’ll be straight about this because I’m tired of people not being straight about it. The point isn’t Ahmed, who was a kid being handed a script by adults. The point isn’t Islam either, which is too easy and misses it. The point is broader and worse. The doctrines we inherit, whatever they are, have the power, when adolescence sets them on fire, to dissolve in a single afternoon what childhood spent years building. I’ve watched them do it. Pretending otherwise is a comfort for people who have never lost a friend to a sentence in a book.

I live an ocean away from that piazza now. I think about it especially when I run into the cheerful, well-meaning argument that sport or music or food is going to save us from ourselves. It isn’t. What it can do is smaller and better: give you, for an hour at a time, a glimpse of the thing we were probably built for. Two jackets in the dust, a scuffed ball, a dozen boys of every conceivable origin moving like one body through the falling light of a southern afternoon — that was not nothing. That was almost everything.

But the glimpse is not the thing. A communion that runs only on shared pleasure has a shelf life, and one of the first grown-up sorrows a person discovers is exactly where the shelf ends. The thread of the ball held us together easily. It was not, in the end, strong enough for the weight of the world we were both being handed by elders in different rooms.

It takes more than a game to make brothers out of us. The serious question — the only one worth asking — is what does.