Rebecca Blackwell/AP

Kids play soccer in a rural area outside of Rustenburg, South Africa.

It’s early Monday in Joburg on a bitterly wintry morning-after and it is back to reality in South Africa: Kids head back to school and workers to work, after a month off for some, as the visitors fly home to different corners of the globe.  The competing soccer teams, and even the naysayers, are long gone.

It's all over.

South Africa is still backslapping itself for having put on a tremendous performance hosting the 2010 World Cup, despite rough play during the final between the victorious Spanish and the Dutch spoilers (my opinion).

But back to my point: In the past few days there’s been much negative psychological talk here about post-tournament blues, depression and a long World Cup hangover in South Africa.

Analysts and specialists have been consulted and confirm this is inevitable and that the World Cup high remains for only so long, before the low sets in.

Take heart South Africa!

Gianluigi Guercia/Getty

Is Landon Donovan ready to pass the torch to Jozy Altidore?

American fan life is different than foreign fan life.

We love drafts. There are plenty of fans who are more into the NFL draft than the NFL season.  We love lists and all-star rosters. Americans love statistics. We prefer the precision of measuring individual performance to the soft science of gauging team chemistry. Often we love the future more than the present.

And so we turn to World Cup 2014.

There are several glaring issues. Who will be the coach? Bob Bradley? Jurgen Klinsmann? None of the above? A plurality of punditry is guessing Bradley will be replaced with a European, someone who might give the U.S. more of a stylistic and tactical identity.

Jerome Delay/AP

South African children blow their vuvuzela's in the Yeoville neighborhood of Johannesburg during World Cup 2010.

This was my first World Cup during which my children were old enough to engage in the event.

My boys are five and seven.  To them the World Cup is a month-long spectacle filled with heroes and villains; crazy fans from far off lands covered in facepaint; vuvuzelas and grown men with funny nicknames. Each day epic battles played out between giants: Messi versus Chicharito; Cristiano Ronaldo versus Sergio Ramos.

My sons were born in South Africa and we now live in Mexico. So for the opening game their loyalties were torn between the country of their birth and their current home.

Schools across Mexico showed the Mexico/South Africa game live.  Finn, the seven-year-old, decided to back South Africa despite having his entire class against him.  He convinced his best friend Carlos to join him and they were a two-man rooting section in a sea of green Mexico jerseys. Fortunately the match ended in a tie.

In Spain, it's already being compared to the kiss Alfred Eisenstaedt captured in Times Square in 1945. The allied forces claimed victory over Japan; World War II was over and a young sailor spontaneously planted one on a young nurse.

Yesterday, during a a live interview, Spain's goalie Iker Casillas just couldn't help himself and surprised Sara Carbonero, his journalist girlfriend, with an impromptu kiss.

El País termed it el beso de la victoria. The victory kiss.

Luca Bruno/AP

Netherlands' Wesley Sneijder upset after his team's loss to Spain in the World Cup 2010 finals: 1-0

I've taken off my feathered orange headdress, wiped the orange glitter off my face. The last of the orange cupcakes I baked last night with love have been claimed and eaten.

With Holland's loss to Spain I felt — in the contagious parlance of my English expat bar buddies — gutted.

Daniel Ochoa de Olza/AP

Spanish players celebrate after winning their match against the Netherlands for the World Cup 2010 victory: 1-0

World Cup 2010 is done with Spain the victors over the Netherlands: 1-0

The Spanish team made history today, making their first World Cup final, then winning it, and the cherry on top: being the first team to win the World Cup after losing their first game in the tournament.

So that's three history making feats for Spain.

Enlarge Gero Breloer/AP

Germany's Sami Khedira (right) celebrates with teammate Per Mertesacker after scoring his side's third goal during the World Cup third-place soccer match between Germany and Uruguay at Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Port Elizabeth, South Africa on Saturday. Germany won 3-2.

Gero Breloer/AP

Germany's Sami Khedira (right) celebrates with teammate Per Mertesacker after scoring his side's third goal during the World Cup third-place soccer match between Germany and Uruguay at Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Port Elizabeth, South Africa on Saturday. Germany won 3-2.

Both teams played with pride and for prestige. It was open and a great game to watch.

Five goals and almost extra time after a last-second free kick thudded against the crossbar.

Germany deserved to win 3-2 and finished third for the second time in succession.

The storyline of the match doesn’t really matter — safe to say the Uruguayan goalkeeper was poor and was culpable for each of the German goals.

Germany is a young team that had a great tournament, finishing as top scorers with 16 goals.

Joachim Low’s players have a real future and will be one of the favorites for the 2012 European Championships and a contender in Brazil in 2014.

Thomas Muller should win the young player of this tournament award.

He finished with five goals – joint top scorer before tomorrow’s final when David Villa and Wesley Sneijder have a chance to win the Golden Boot outright.

Also finishing on five goals is Uruguay’s Diego Forlan. He carried his team in this tournament.

For those of you keeping track, Paul the octopus kept up his record, correctly forecasting the outcome of this game.

Now onto the championship match tomorrow in Soccer City in Johannesburg!

Luca Bruno/AP

Spain's Puyol after his header, which would end Germany's World Cup run.

SPAIN VS. GERMANY

Like I said in my welcome post for "Cleats,"  I'm new to the World Cup and was eager to learn all about it.  So, I started blogging about soccer-subjects in my comfort zone — fashion on the pitch, how I loved the ESPN announcers shouting the name of South African midfielder Tshabalala (something I still do, even though South Africa has been out for weeks), and the highlight of the Portugal/Brazil draw involving a shirtless Cristiano Ronaldo.  But as the World Cup progressed, I started reading everything I could get my hands on about "footy." I watched all the matches and took copious notes; I started to understand why people all over the world are so obsessed with this sport. And, a few days ago, as I was watching the semifinal match between Germany and Spain, my colleague secretly put a recording device in my cubicle.

This bit of audio captures THE moment that I succumbed to "World Cup Fever" and I will never, ever be the same. Tshabalala! (Shereen Marisol Meraji, "Cleats" blog host and producer for All Things Considered)

Richard Heathcote/Getty Images Europe

A view of the personalisation of the adidas Jo'bulani official match ball for the 2010 FIFA World Cup Final between the Netherlands and Spain. This ball was named slightly different than the one that has been used throughout the tournament.

It’s probably not all that surprising that this year’s World Cup has had its share of controversial goals, controversial offside calls, controversial foul calls, and controversial foul non-calls.

A bit more surprising is the controversy caused by the tournament’s ball.

Adidas created the Jabulani especially for the South African World Cup. It’s made from thermally bonded panels, instead of the traditional 32 panels of pentagons and hexagons.

That makes it a lot smoother, but has given the players fits.

“You might think if you make a ball very, very smooth, it will fly through the air better than a ball that is rough,” says John Eric Goff, chair of the physics department at Lynchburg College and author of Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports.

You might think that, but you’d be wrong.

Christopher Lee/Getty Images Europe

Let The Games Begin: Sunday's World Cup final inspired an Amsterdam shop to stage a miniature version of the game in its display window, using "comedy condoms" to represent soccer players from Spain and the Netherlands.

The 2010 World Cup final features Europe's two biggest party countries: Spain and Holland. That fact alone — and scenes of fans-gone-wild in the huge plazas of Amsterdam and Madrid — should help ease the global audience's distaste for an all-Europe final.

And the fact that the title game will lack both the German team's discipline and the Italian squad's stubbornness also helps — this is just the third time since 1966 that neither of those teams is in the final. Instead, we get teams representing some of the world's most accomplished revelers.