WORLD CUP USA ’94 / THE FIRST ROUND : Patriot Games : Italy-Ireland Celebrants Form a Pageant Steeped in Ethnic Pride

In the end, it was more than a game. It was a far-off place and, a time--yesteryear to come home to.

They came in their thousands Saturday to a stadium from which they could see the shimmering towers of a great city immigrant ancestors had built.

They came remembering.

The Irish came from Dublin, yes, but joyous battalions trekked also from Queens, and Ohio, and with their pipes and their shamrock shirts from suburban New Jersey.

There were some Italians from Rome, but many more from New York, Philadelphia, and Ontario, Canada; first-generation immigrants half a century removed from rural poverty, and proud second-generation Italians from Albany, N.Y, and Scranton, Pa., who can’t say “ Buon giorno .”

They came, 74,826 of them with flags, banners and ethnic pride, to cheer a game their fathers had loved more.

And in the cheering, they turned Giants Stadium into a gigantic celebration of self.

“This is who I am, this is my heritage,” said Bob Wade, who brought his bagpipes and a vanload of fellow Irish-Americans from Pittstown, N.J. “I think Ireland can go all the way--and we’ll be here all the way.”

Pasquale Steriti left the hills south of Rome looking for work 20 years ago. He found it in Philadelphia. On Saturday he came to the New Jersey haze with an Italian flag wrapped around his neck.

“I’m American, sure. But I eat Italian, I dream Italian, my heart--right here--will always be Italian,” Steriti said.

Outside, traffic roared along the New Jersey Turnpike and streamed toward New York on Route 3. New York has the Knicks, the Yankees and Mets, the new champion Rangers, probably also the Gay Games higher on its sports agenda than soccer. America at large cares even less.

Yet for all of the rookie fans there Saturday afternoon, Giants Stadium quickly acquired an intensity so consuming it might have been in Europe, South America or one of the other continents where soccer comes first.

Like the game, the stadium Saturday belonged to Ireland, the green, white and orange outnumbering the Italian colors seven or eight to one.

“It sounded like a home match to me,” said Ray Houghton, who scored the only goal. “We were told there would be more Italian fans than Irish, so we couldn’t believe what we actually saw. It certainly gave us a great lift.”

And that, opined psychiatrist Joseph Gagliardo on his way to the stadium Saturday, is really the name of the game.

Gagliardo immigrated to the United States from Sicily in 1953. He lives in St. Louis, but Saturday afternoon found him happily in a forest of Italian red, white and green.

“Are people crazy to come thousands of miles to see a soccer game? No. Sports has replaced religion for many people. Soccer, well-played, is even more beautiful than religion,” said Gagliardo, who hadn’t seen Italy play in person for 25 years.

David Coleman, an Irishman who emigrated to Canada in 1975, came from Toronto with two friends to cheer for Eire.

“It’s a strange place to find a World Cup. People have no feel for the game. You can’t build soccer like this from the top down; it has to come from the grass roots. It’s a bit like having the World Series in England,” he said.

Antonio and Amerigo Bevilacqua, who left a mountain village near the Adriatic Sea 40 years ago for a new life in Canada, drove down from Welland in Ontario for the game, lugging two well-worn flags that read “Forza Italia.”

“People on this side of the ocean don’t know about this game,” Antonio said. “That’s their problem.”

Roberto Falciani, a Roman who found a pasta dish in Manhattan on Friday night he said was as good as any he has ever eaten at home, (fettucine with shrimp and green peas) is more sanguine about America’s Cup.

“We need to encourage the game here, and this must help,” he said. “Of course people are different, and it may be that Americans never come to love the game as we do.”

A lot of them loved it Saturday--many for the first time, and perhaps most for reasons that had less to do with sports than with family histories.

Joseph Colagiovanni, a young lawyer and second-generation Italian-American who grew up listening to his father and uncles rave about a game he hardly knew in a language he barely understood, came home with a rush Saturday.

“I’m an American,” he said. “But today I’m also Italian.”