The Big Show shut down for two days, and it gave us a taste of what our summer will be like only 10 days hence.

Ack.

For three full weeks we could watch at least two World Cup matches every day. Twenty-one consecutive days. If we had a couple of TVs, we could watch two matches at once during the four days when the eight groups were playing their final group matches.

It became a part of our lives. Again. Some TV shows don’t last three weeks … and lots of them don’t produce 21 days of programming, and we glutted ourselves on it.

Then, we had two days of … nothing. No matches, heading into the quarterfinals. I’m sure I wasn’t the only guy jones-ing pretty hard. And we will have more jones-ing, short-term.  Another two days off before the semifinals … and then two days off till the third-place match (which, yes, I probably will watch) … and then It All Goes Black after the final on July 11.

So, do we have a solution for this?

1. Stretch the World Cup calendar. Yes, it turns out that a month-and-a-day isn’t enough. We do this by … spreading out the matches by another week or so. Why do we need to have three or four matches every day for 21 days? Instead of blowing through those first 56 matches in 21 days, why not spread them over 28 days? That still gives us two per day and adds a full week to the schedule. This thing could have started back on June 4 … or stretched as late as July 18. The host country already has all those facilities and volunteers, and the tourists have already bought their plane tickets … just make the World Cup it longer! (What? Players can’t be expected to go from playing with their clubs to maybe six-plus weeks in the World Cup and right back to playing for their clubs? Hmm.)

2. Make the World Cup bigger. This adds more matches, which also results in a longer tournament. If the NCAA Tournament (in American college basketball) was better with 64 teams than with 48 or 32, and will be better yet with 68 … wouldn’t a World Cup be better with, say, 40 countries participating? What we do is make the eight groups of four into eight groups of five. Simple. This also makes getting to the final 16 even more significant. The group phase becomes four matches instead of three, and that takes another week to get done. I like this! More random countries in the World Cup! … But then we’re back to players taking on an extra match as well as potentially being in another country for those same 38 days or so.

3. Playing the World Cup more often. What kills us about the end of the World Cup is knowing that we aren’t going to be able to see Germany-England — or Ivory Coast-North Korea — again for four years. Waiting for 2014 … that’s a long, long time. Qualifying is fun, and all, and it will start in some places as early as next year … but it’s not the World Cup, and playing your neighbors in qualifying is interesting, but not as interesting as playing someone from the other side of the planet in the World Cup.

So, how about every three years? Every two years? Yes, we have continental championships with which to deal, and that pesky “playing the athletes to death” thing, but … If just about every other sport in the planet can manage an annual world championship, can’t the geniuses at FIFA manage it? (Remember guys, more money is involved. That ought to get their attention.)

4. And our last suggestion … just deal with it.

Everything ends. Our games. Our lives. Our sun someday will go supernova.

We can stretch the World Cup, we can play it more often, but it will still be over. And we will have to carry on. I imagine we will this time, too. Though it is a bit difficult to fathom, at the moment.