In the United States, cricket is largely an afterthought. The sport once had some cache here, but gradually gave way to baseball two centuries ago as America's bat-and-ball game of choice.
In Pakistan—as in other South Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan—cricket is something approaching a secular religion. This is, after all, a nation that elected a cricketer (legendary all-rounder Imran Khan) prime minister in 2018.
It was to the great shock of the sports world, then, that the United States defeated Pakistan in a super over Thursday at the men's T20 World Cup in Dallas (a super over is a tiebreaking mechanism not dissimilar from extra innings in baseball).
