Twelve years on, Brazil 2014 has settled into place as the strangest World Cup of the modern era. Not the best, since 1970 and 1982 have that argument sewn up, but the one where the most improbable things happened in sequence, in the country least equipped to absorb them.
It produced 171 goals in 64 matches, equalling the record set in 1998 with eight fewer games than that format allowed. It was fast, chaotic and almost entirely without the cautious group-stage football everyone had learned to expect.
The holders lasted eight days
Spain arrived having won the previous World Cup and the two European Championships either side of it, with a style half the continent had spent six years trying to copy.
They opened against the Netherlands, the team they had beaten in the 2010 final, and lost 5-1. The match turned on a Robin van Persie header struck while horizontal, looping over Iker Casillas from twenty yards, an image that immediately outlived the game. Chile beat them 2-0 five days later and it was over. The holders went home before the group stage finished.
Nothing since has quite ended an era so abruptly.
Group D, and England
England were drawn with Italy, Uruguay and Costa Rica and finished bottom with one point. That is the part English readers remember.
The better story is Costa Rica, who were expected to lose all three and instead won the group. They beat Uruguay 3-1 after going a goal down, beat Italy 1-0, drew with England, and then knocked out Greece on penalties to reach the quarter-finals, where the Netherlands needed a shootout of their own to get past them. They conceded twice in five matches.
The bite
Luis Suárez, in Uruguay's decisive group game against Italy, bit Giorgio Chiellini on the shoulder.
It was the third time in his career. FIFA banned him for four months and nine international matches. Uruguay won the game and went out in the next round. Chiellini spent the following days pulling down his shirt for photographers.
It remains the only World Cup incident that is genuinely difficult to explain to somebody who was not alive for it.
James Rodríguez
Colombia came without Radamel Falcao and were carried by a 22-year-old at Monaco whom most casual viewers could not have named in May.
James Rodríguez scored in every match and finished with six, taking the Golden Boot. The one against Uruguay in the last sixteen — chest down with his back to goal, turn, volley off the underside of the bar from twenty-five yards — is the goal of the tournament by common consent and has aged extremely well.
The Mineirazo
Then the semi-final, in Belo Horizonte, on 8 July.
Brazil were without Neymar, who had fractured a vertebra against Colombia, and without Thiago Silva, suspended. The pre-match ceremony involved the squad holding up Neymar's shirt. The country had spent a month in a state of enormous, brittle expectation.
Germany scored in the eleventh minute. Then in the twenty-third, twenty-fourth, twenty-sixth and twenty-ninth. Five goals in eighteen minutes. Two more after the break. Oscar's late consolation made it 7-1 and nobody celebrated.
Miroslav Klose's goal, the second, was his sixteenth in World Cups, taking him past Ronaldo as the tournament's all-time leading scorer. It is now a footnote to a scoreline.
The television pictures were mostly of the crowd, because there was nothing useful to show on the pitch. Brazil then lost the third-place match 3-0 to the Netherlands, conceding ten goals in two games.
The final
Germany beat Argentina 1-0 at the Maracanã. Mario Götze, on as a substitute, took a cross on his chest and volleyed it across Sergio Romero in the 113th minute.
Messi won the Golden Ball and looked unconvinced about it. Manuel Neuer took the Golden Glove after a tournament that changed what people expect a goalkeeper to do with the space behind his defence. Paul Pogba was named best young player.
Germany's win completed a decade-long rebuild begun after their own failure at Euro 2000, which is the boring explanation for why they were able to score four goals in six minutes against a host nation.
Why it still holds up
Most tournaments are remembered for one thing. Brazil 2014 has six or seven, and they are all first-order strange: the champions eliminated in a week, a player biting an opponent, Costa Rica topping a group of former winners, Tim Howard making fifteen saves in one match, a host nation losing 7-1 in a semi-final at home.
It is also the last World Cup before the format and the calendar started moving around, which gives it a settled, finished quality that the ones after it do not have yet.
Where the app comes in
Brazil 2014 is a small archive of the whole tournament: every match and score, the group tables with their points and goal differences, squad lists for all thirty-two teams, and the awards.
It is not live and never will be. It works offline, has no advertising, and exists because looking up what happened in a 2014 group game usually means three clicks through a site that would rather show you today's transfer rumours.
Look up Group D. It is better than you remember.