The other moment didn't happen in a World Cup match at all, it happened in an MLS game, filling the yawning two-day soccer void between the semi-finals and the consolation match. The Columbus Crew, who'd been limping along for weeks without their four best players, finally had them back from France and were hosting the Chicago Fire, a team on an eleven-game winning streak, whose sole World Cup absentee has only played for them once, anyway. The Crew won, 3-0, but the moment that thrilled me had nothing, really, to do with the result, it was Brian McBride's flying scissors-kick for the third goal, not for its physical elegance (in slow-motion, to be truthful, it looked a bit gangly), but just because McBride was there in Columbus, in front of a smallish weeknight crowd, two weeks to the night after the US was drummed out of the Cup in a meaningless but much-noted statistical dead-last, throwing his body into the air to get his foot on a cross, as if this game meant every bit as much. I felt like crying: for Brian and the rest of the US team, who poured and will continue to pour their hearts into representing us on the world's biggest sporting stage; for the millions of us who refuse to let the public indignities soccer suffers in this country deter us from adoring it obsessively; for every nation like us whose heroes come back bleeding, to be restored by our belief.

And because the mechanics of the tournament demand that most teams come home disappointed, "Don't Come Home Too Soon", Del Amitri's lush official theme song for Scotland, could easily be adopted by the rest of the world. Although it exhorts the team to succeed, as all such anthems must, the song's clever twist is to couch the flag-waving in warm, uncritical affection and preemptive forgiveness, so that it makes as much sense as a welcome as it does a send-off. The song's sighed mantra, "Even long shots make it", is not a prediction of Scottish success, it is a defense of their participation, and when Currie sings "Let all France have whiskey on its breath", I take him to mean "Let our spirit inspire them", not "Let them fall at our feet". Strings swell and glimmer, the side itself contributes tastefully unobtrusive backing vocals, and the song spirals away into the night like a village parade disappearing over the next rise. Scotland didn't make it out of the first round, either, their seemingly eternal symbiosis of qualification and finals futility an ongoing counter to Euro-centric claims that Europe doesn't get enough places in the field, but the critics leaping on all the teams whose expectations outlasted them miss a crucial point about the nature of the event. Although it is a competition, it is even more spectacularly a celebration, not just of soccer itself, but of four more years during which the bits of the planet managed mainly to coexist. We sent Brian and Joe-Max and Cobi and Eddie and the rest of them off to France knowing they'd be slaughtered on the field; we did it because seeing Frankie Hejduk bang shots off the posts and keep running tells the world, and tells us, more about our real character than all the UN Security Council minutes and Dallas re-runs put together. We play with all our hearts, we want to say, but by the same rules, and we accept the outcome. And our team comes home with news of how the world is, and then goes back to whatever it was that made them our heroes to begin with.

Perhaps yet more indicative of the Scottish equanimity is the fact that this disc, in addition to the regular and instrumental versions of the title track, usually the complete contents of a sports-tie-in single, adds two Del Amitri b-sides, so that even though the Cup turned out to be the familiar bust, we've at least got some new music to listen to. Del Amitri have an ulterior motive in doing this, admittedly, as this single doubles as advance promotion for their greatest-hits album, to be released initially (in the UK) with a bonus disc of b-sides. The one here slated for inclusion on the bonus disc is "Paper Thin", a shivery, harmonica-drenched blues lament about the bleakness of material success, which plays, except for the choice of the protagonist's industry, uncannily like a ballad for Phil Hartman. It's the other one, though, "Three Little Words", that will join my personal list of Del Amitri's cast-off masterworks. Twangy mid-Seventies guitar licks, a slow snare toll, thoughtful piano and a melody that flits into breathy falsetto wrap around another in Currie's endless permutations of romantic disintegration, this one about how the phrase "I love you", itself, can be the vector by which infidelity spreads. I don't know what this has to do with soccer, but it's time to stop asking everything to, for a while.

The other b-side original here, disappointing if you had your heart set on a Björk cover after seeing the title, is "Bachelorette", a spare, reeling experiment in metric evasion, with an eight-beat frame that seems to me to break into 3-3-2 more readily than 4-4, rattling percussion, grumbling bass and Tori's piano dodging around each other like the first one to hit a beat squarely loses. It has the usual Tori virtues, her swooping voice and a sense of tempo that seems to take literally the idea that walking is repeatedly falling forward and catching yourself, but the detail that sends me into seizures is the transition from the chorus back to the verse. As Tori sings "There's a window, there's a window" the song decelerates almost to a stop, and then starts up again, mid-beat, with two quick stick-hits that are, I've decided, after replaying the surrounding few measures for minutes on end learning to count along, measuring the underlying tempo for the restart, but the pattern of accents in the verse is so off-center that it takes two passes through the drum cycle before I can actually hear that the count-off matches the meter, which is a pretty ostentatious perversion of a thousand punk songs' metronomic crutch.

The song that flabbergasted me most thoroughly, though, which is saying something in this company, is the single's one cover, of, of all things, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". I do not like this song. No, let me be clearer: I hate Christmas music with a vehemence usually reserved for war criminals and drivers who do not understand rotary rights-of-way. The lowest circle in Hell, in my cosmology, is air-conditioned and tastefully decorated and lit, and I am asked to do nothing more taxing than play strategic board games with famous historical intellects, but Johnny Mathis and Perry Como singing Christmas standards are piped into the room at just above a subliminal volume, and before the end of the first week I've completely lost my mind. But by the time Tori gets through with the song it seems so beautiful to me that aliens must have landed and taught it to us. Part of this is due, no doubt, to Tori's penchant for singing to us like we're people, not cherubic ceramic gnomes, which turns the tune, even for me, from a hopelessly cloying cliché to an exquisite benediction. Part of it, though, is due to one of the most inexplicable and brilliant production impulses I can remember ever coming across, a low, cyclic whir that runs under the entire song, at a speed unrelated to the music, as if the recording was made in the base of an active lighthouse, whose rotating beacon produced enough electromagnetic flux to perturb the tape particles. I don't know which thing would guide me back to safety more surely, a massive beam of light stabbing out across the open ocean, or Tori's voice, reminding me why life is precious.

The good news is that I have managed to listen to this EP several times, now, without wanting to kill anybody. I haven't, I must admit, tried to scrutinize the lyrics, so my equilibrium may be artificial, but I'm not going to risk Heisenberg interference, so the illusion will go unchallenged. Musically, the EP is inevitably somewhat erratic, given its b-side origins, but it sounds enough like OK Computer for me to believe that I've come to terms with a proxy for the era, which is all I wanted. "Airbag" itself is clattering and elegiac, Yorke's vocal wafting over the choppy drumming as if the two things are part of two entirely different jams, intently oblivious of each other. "Pearly" is much less abstruse, guitar feedback and cymbal hiss swirling around like a midpoint between Eno/U2 atmospherics and the blaring disharmony of the Boo Radleys' C'Mon Kids. The abstract instrumental "Meeting in the Aisle", complementarily, foregoes distortion bluster entirely, substituting heavily processed guitar chimes and a cheesy drum-machine groove. "A Reminder", a few slow, speculative chord-progressions over a bed of crowd murmur, sounds like Radiohead's answer to the Cowboy Junkies or Low. "Polyethylene [Parts 1 & 2]", after a desolate voice-and-acoustic-guitar introduction, explodes into Radiohead's old guitar-wall confidence, with only their hesitance to embrace the proffered 4/4 beat to prompt comparisons to prog-rock, instead of "Anyone Can Play Guitar" and "Creep". "Melatonin", Yorke, some glassy synthesizers and a burbling beat-box, would be a functional lullaby if it didn't jerk to a stop so gracelessly at the end. And "Palo Alto", the finale, gales of space noise, busy signals and rough-edged guitar mock-bravado, is like a rock song that's been half-disemboweled while still alive, so that you can see its internal organs glistening as it flails, searching for the source of its pervasive agony. I'm sure modern technology provides a less invasive way to peer inside a frayed mind, one that doesn't expose the observer to the madness in the course of demonstrating it, as much, and it's probably still an exaggeration to say I enjoy this, but it's a compromise, and perhaps the seed of détente.

After hearing it I can move again, but most of the questions have been deferred, not answered. She still sings like Alanis, the accompaniment, for which she receives sole writing credit, combines humming guitars, sturdy drums and some histrionic string runs (it is a soundtrack song, after all), and the dynamics swell and plunge acrobatically. It sounds like an Alanis Morissette song, but after a million repetitions of Jagged Little Pill I expect almost anybody could fashion one or two plausible isolated facsimiles of the style; composing a whole coherent second album will be an order of complexity harder. It is the lyrics that start, dangerously, to raise my hopes: they will be misread as a comment on her celebrity, I'm pretty sure ("Like anyone would be, / I am flattered by your fascination with me", the song begins), but if you have the patience to transcribe more than the first couplet (and don't get distracted by the parts I can't figure out, unless the second verse really is rhyming "stoic squirrel" with "burning shepherd"), you find, unsurprisingly, a relationship song, and one that fits comfortably into the puzzle of which "Head Over Feet" and "Not the Doctor" are other pieces, as its narrator struggles to understand the tension between a suitor's persistence and her own rules and defense mechanisms. "You're uninvited, an unfortunate slight", she says, as if his status is somehow external to their interaction, something they both have to reluctantly account for, and certain courses of action that would be open if she had chosen him are simply not available when the impetus is reversed. "I don't think you unworthy", she finally explains, "I need a moment to deliberate", and there, to my pleased surprise, the song ends, leaving us to wonder how the deliberation turns out, or whether the point is that she's walled herself in so securely that resolution is impossible. A lot of people sniped at the text of Jagged Little Pill (with a wildly inappropriate indignation, I thought, given the standard of inanity other pop lyrics generally adhere to), but I felt, listening to it, like I was reliving all the heartbreakingly poignant moments of grand revelation I had when I was her age, when every immortal truth, no matter how old in fact, was new to me. It's easy to forget, after all, that the millions of copies of Jagged Little Pill we bought are something we imposed on Alanis, not something she claimed for herself. She doesn't owe us anything, and she isn't responsible for our tastes. I pray that when her second album comes out, we remember that. No, that's futile; I pray that when her second album comes out, she remembers that. We are too eager to take kids who hardly know themselves, yet, and crush them under our insistence that they internalize all our characteristics, aspirations and illusions along with their own. You could see it in Ronaldo's eyes, trapped in the Stade de France, as the French felt their fingers start to close around the Cup. "You told me I was the best player in the world", I could almost hear him saying. "But I can't feel my own body. I can't see the ball, I can't move. I need to go home. But where, now, will I go? If I was the world's hero, now I have let the world down, so who is left?" Did Jagged Little Pill make it to Brazil, I wonder? He needs it, now. "Perfect", to pull the toxins out, and then "Hand in My Pocket", to sing the courage to begin again. We turn on our heroes so quickly, the moment they betray a frailty. But don't we see, it is only the acceptance of their frailties that makes them our heroes?