Another Summer to Remember? For Germany: So Far, So Great.

The arc of Philipp Lahm’s career had the rhythm of someone meticulously ticking items off a bucket list. He won eight German championships with Bayern Munich, the team he supported as a child. He served as its captain for six years. He led the club to a domestic and European treble. A year later, he captained Germany to World Cup glory.

Now, a few years into retirement, Lahm has become a respected figurehead for German soccer as a whole: smart, thoughtful, discreet by inclination but frank when required. He has occupied a handful of honorary, ambassadorial posts, but in 2020 was given a real job, as tournament director of Euro 2024.

Yet for everything else he has achieved, Lahm will always be remembered in his homeland as the man who ushered in the Sommermärchen, the fairy-tale summer, of 2006. All that year’s World Cup became, all it meant to Germany then and all it means to Germany now, started with his goal in the opening game, here in Munich, against Costa Rica.

Germany did not win that tournament, of course. The host’s run ended, in a technical sense, in heartbreak. If anything, though, that heightened the meaning with which it was subsequently imbued. For Germany, the 2006 World Cup has always been less about the outcome than — in a surprisingly literal sense — about the friends it made along the way.

After just a single game of this year’s tournament, it is much too early to declare that the scorer of the host’s opening goal in Euro 2024, the elfin Bayer Leverkusen playmaker Florian Wirtz, is destined to follow in Lahm’s path.