Science World

Norway lost. Norway did not care.

More than 100,000 fans flooded the streets of Oslo on Monday to welcome their national football team home, just two days after a heartbreaking 2-1 extra-time defeat to England ended their quarterfinal run at the World Cup.

It was Norway's best World Cup result in the country's history, their first appearance in the tournament in 28 years, and it clearly did not matter that the story ended in a loss. The squad landed to a traditional water cannon salute before an open-top bus parade carried them through the capital. Crowds packed the square in front of the Royal Palace, where King Harald received the team before Crown Prince Haakon led the entire square through the now famous "Viking Row," pounding the same drumbeat he kept during the defeat in Miami days earlier.

Captain Martin Odegaard summed it up simply. "It's simply incredible to see all the support we receive and to see how much the country is behind us."

Erling Haaland, who scored seven goals across the tournament and became one of its most talked about players, left before the final stage of the celebration and missed the closing Viking Row on the palace steps.

A country of 5.6 million people did not throw a parade because their team won the World Cup. They threw one because their team made them believe, for the first time in nearly three decades, that they could.

In December 2016, gunmen from the Tequileros drug gang kidnapped a local engineer named Isauro de Paz Duque in Totolapan, Mexico, part of a wave of abductions and killings that had terrorized the region for months.

His wife, Yadira Guillermo García, did not wait for authorities to act.

Alongside dozens of armed townspeople who had reached their breaking point, she helped seize the mother of the gang's leader, a man known locally as El Tequilero. Then she recorded a video and addressed him directly.

"We have your mother here, mister known as El Tequilero," she said. "I propose an exchange. I'll give you your mother if you give me my husband, but I want him safe and sound."

The Guerrero state government sent over 200 soldiers and police to defuse the standoff. Negotiations dragged on for days.

In the end, both hostages were released unharmed. Her husband came home. The gang leader's mother went home too.

An entire community had spent months living in fear of a cartel that operated with near total impunity. One woman decided the only language that stood a chance of being heard was the gang's own.