Once every four years, there are really only two kinds of women: 1) football enthusiasts who enjoy the month-long spectacle that is the FIFA World Cup of Football, and 2) football widows who resent it because it takes their men’s attention away.

I’m a World Cup football kind of girl myself. I love the mania of the intensity of competition and everything that goes with. My first World Cup was 1982 and I was in sixth form, in the middle of studying for finals when I was introduced to it by an aunt who was living with us at the time who’d got me watching English football league matches on a Sunday afternoon. (Tottenham Hot Spur, yay!). But the World Cup was something else.

I couldn’t study. I was sure I was going to fail, cramming only during half-time breaks as I did. But all that was unimportant. Besides, it was only Lower Sixth. What I was witnessing, I understood then, was something bigger than me, bigger than piddling school exams. Twenty-four teams from six confederations had converged on Spain that summer — wall-to-wall quality players; an embarrassment of riches.

Clearly, this was more than your simple Sunday afternoon football; stars and star playing abounded in every single match regardless of the outcome. For one, as a teenage girl who had no brothers, and who attended an all-girls’ high school, it captured my imagination in a wild and wonderful way, if you know what I mean.

But the World Cup was more than simply indulging my man-watching fantasies (although, let’s be honest, there’s a lot of that involved); for someone like me, who’d been content to simply drift through life, watching men defend their respective nations’ pride and honour alerted me to the infinite possibilities of personal ambition, which had been found to be sorely lacking. Judging from how goal-oriented and competitive I now am, there may be some conclusions to be drawn.

You can imagine my amusement, then, on receiving a recent e-mail from a young writer encouraging me to support Brazil in their World Cup campaign this year. I don’t support Brazil because it’s the “Jamaican” thing to do. I support that team because, well, I’ve been doing so all this time. I remember it fondly, vividly, even today. Here were men, considered by me then to be the sloppier and definitely more undisciplined of the species, doing an incredible job of displaying their talents for organisation, teamwork and discipline. It was nothing short of inspiring to watch.

There were, I discovered, other styles of playing than the European style I’d known. In Spain ’82, I discovered the flamboyant, passionate and entertaining South Americans. That was the year an impressive Maradona played his first World Cup for Argentina, but the team I fell in love with in an unmatched way was Brazil, about whom it is said that the English created football but the Brazilians perfected it.

How had I never known about them before? These days you have your teams with one or two stand-out players around whom the teams survive, you know, your Cristiano Ronaldos, your Didier Drogbas, your Lionel Messis or your Wayne Rooneys. Please. In 1982, the Brazilian team was comprised of a plethora of stars.

It was crazy. There were the likes of Sócrates, Zico, Éder, Falcão, Júnior, Serginho, Juninho, Edinho, Oscar, Batista. All on one team. Indeed, three of them (Sócrates, Zico and Falcão) were included on the list of the 10 best players of the 1982 competition — Brazil was the only country with more than one player appearing on the list.

These guys are why I’ve never missed a World Cup since.

I’ve learnt this. Men, through contact sports, are able to work cohesively together toward a goal, literally and figuratively, in a way that women don’t truly seem to be able to.

There’s something enviable about that fraternity, I think. All these guys with all that great talent and they are all part of a club, a brotherhood, right there on the world’s biggest stage for football. I sense a real camaraderie, even in the face of intense competition, when they tumble all over each other in defence of a goal. The closest I’ve come to feeling that bond with other women is in the fictional world of Sex & the City.

Last World Cup was another memorable competition for all the wrong reasons; my mother died midway through it, and in my hollowed-out state of grief I was unable to stay with it until the end, although I did manage in a distracted, mournful sort of way to witness the final, and Zidane’s spectacular meltdown — that seemingly unprovoked headbutt to Materazzi. In the intervening years, I feared I would never be able to watch another World Cup, that I would be forever affected by the memory, in pretty much the same way that someone who loses a loved one over the Christmas holidays forever after associates December with sadness.

Besides, how would I ever forgive myself for the memory that haunted me for a long time of the annoyance I initially felt at being disturbed in the middle of a match I was watching, when my father telephoned me, dazed and confused, to tell me that my mother had, a few minutes before, collapsed and was not responding to him?

But this World Cup I’m back and loving it. There’s no lingering sadness, no exquisitely unbearable pain at the memory of my mother’s passing when I sit down to watch a match. I guess time really does heal wounds, and four years have made all the difference in the world.

This is what those of us who love World Cup season understand. Four years elapse slowly when you think about all the changes that occur beneath the surface. But in another sense, they also go by very quickly. I can’t believe so much time has passed since I last spoke to my mother. But that’s one of those paradoxes of Time.

Hurrying home from the supermarket to catch the Brazil/North Korea match last week, it struck me everything has changed and nothing has changed. I’m no longer who I was in 82. I’m not even who I was in 2006. And yet I am. The 2010 Brazil players are nothing like the ones on the 1982 team. But, in some inexplicable and weird way, they are; maybe they no longer make my heart beat the way it did when I was 17 and in love with every one of them, but they can still make a blue Tuesday evening seem so much brighter. Ah, my love for the beautiful game remains unchanged.