Italy Is on Top of the World

Nearby, at Les Halles, a popular French restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue, a mix of 100 French, Serb and Japanese people gathered to watch the game and shouted " Allez Les Bleus " practically every time a Frenchman touched the ball. At the end of the game, Nicolas Legret, a chef, was a bit despondent and draped a French flag over the restaurant's big screen television, triggering the place, even in grief, to roar with glee one last time.

This World Cup was also notable for things that didn't happen. The two major pre-tournament concerns, hooliganism and racially motivated violence, turned out to be largely unfounded, outside of a handful of instances.

Polish and German fans clashed when their teams met in Dortmund in the first round, though not to the extent that many feared, and German and English fans were involved in a melee in Stuttgart, an alcohol-fueled incident that involved thrown chairs and resulted in 300 arrests. Domenech, the French coach, claimed that the black players on his team were taunted with monkey chants as their bus approached Hanover's AWD Arena for a quarterfinal against Spain.

But all of that was overshadowed by a stirring performance from the home team and host country. Germans, who were so pessimistic about their team's potential prior to the tournament, embraced the Mannschaft , as the national team is known, as the games wore on and the team kept winning. The national flag began popping up everywhere, from apartment windows and construction cranes and cars. People burst into chants of "Deutschland" and "Lukas Podolski" -- the name of one of the team's forwards, who was named the tournament's outstanding young player -- while standing in subway cars.

Germany lost to Italy, 2-0, in the semifinals -- the best game of the tournament -- but that did little to damper to party atmosphere. Germany's 3-1 victory over Portugal in the third-place match on Saturday night set off celebrations in Berlin, with honking car horns and fireworks. The players awoke to newspapers proclaiming "You are our world champions" and "The world champion of our hearts." An estimated 500,000 fans greeted the team -- whose members were wearing shirts with "Danke Deutschland" written across the front -- at the Berlin Fan Mile on Sunday afternoon.

And that was just a prelude to the celebration inside of Olympic Stadium. The Italians ran joyfully around the field, pausing in front of their delirious fans to bounce up and down, pumping their hands in the air. Meantime, the French, who were champions in 1998, sat quietly on the grass; some players cried.

Zidane did not join his teammates as they somberly walked across the stage to accept their runner-up medals. Gattuso was handed a pair of blue shorts, in a darker shade than the Azzurri's classic blue, so he was fully dressed when he received his medal. Fabio Cannavaro, the Italian team captain, planted a kiss on the trophy, and the celebration began anew.

Foreign correspondent Molly Moore contributed to this report from Paris, special correspondent Sarah Delaney contributed from Rome and staff reporters Dan Morse and Ian Shapira contributed from Washington.