The Country of "What If"

After Greece won the European Soccer Championship I heard a lot of comments on what feats of soccer greatness Romanians would have made had they been part of the competition in Portugal. It is interesting to note that no such comments were made prior to Greece winning the top prize.
The argument in the vein of "what if" follows a simple line: "If Greece was able to pull it off, can you imagine what Romanians would have accomplished had they been there?"

If I am not mistaken, even coach Anghel Iordanescu made such a comment, on how well Romania’s team would have performed, had the referee not had a slanted attitude in the match opposing us to Denmark, in the qualifiers.
This is so typical of Romanian-type of thinking! It has nothing to do with performance-driven thinking! We still get inebriated from drinking the crystal clear water from the mountain springs in the mountains that had not been discovered as they are yet to be formed …

Let’s get serious! The natural conclusion of such argument would be that since we are able to beat the Greeks in a soccer match at any time of the day, the title they won in Portugal is rightly ours … Only that we run out of luck …

One thing it is true though: we are indeed world champions, not only European ones, when it comes to delusional speculations, to twisted arguments and easy-made excuses.
Communism taught us a well-learned lesson on how not to accomplish anything and yet on how to pretend we did. Furthermore, we never take responsibility for our own failures. Always someone else or something else is to blame: the running waters, the trembling trees, the star-dusted sky, the world …
We never ask ourselves if we are to blame for our failures, at least one tiny bit.

Thus, after the last trick we pulled to place the guilt on others did not stick, after we lost the qualifying match for Euro 2004, we still have the nerve to speculate on how well we would have performed "had we been there."
We are beyond cure. We are forever lost in The Country of "What If" …