The Euros winning the Ryder Cup was very big over here. “Massive!”, as the Brits like to say.

Seems as if half the sports department (the British half) stayed up into the wee hours of Sunday night/Monday morning to watch the big comeback by Europe against the U.S.  “I couldn’t turn it off!” one said. (Meanwhile, I was watching the Patriots and Bills.)

As I may have mentioned recently, we have a default setting for our sports preferences here at The National …

… and it is “we root for the Brits!”

Goes back to the UAE being a British colony for 150 years or so. Britons are numerous here, and they are more comfortable in these parts than most expats because the locals (the Emiratis) seem to be comfortable with a range of British institutions and cultural concepts, from the long colonial relationship.

So.

Over here, it was the “Medinah Miracle” for Team Europe.

In the States, I imagine it was more like the “Medinah Meltdown.”

To be honest, we have to concede the Ryder Cup is significant in the States … but not like it is to the Europeans. And especially to the Brits. I’m not sure the Ryder Cup was in the top two stories, on ESPN, by the end of the day, Sunday.

“NFL something” would have been No. 1 … and Nascar probably was No. 2.

And this wasn’t just U.S. fans trying to escape the stink of failure. The Ryder Cup is a fairly goofy event, hard to follow (how many Yanks have any idea how the first-day scoring works?), and my sense always has been that it is not all that big an event.

(True story. As a sports editor in San Bernardino, California, I commissioned and helped write a “top 10 local sports stories of 1991” piece that ran on December 31, and we did not include the Ryder Cup — which that year was won by the U.S., which was coached by Dave Stockton, a San Bernardino native, and he wrote me an indignant letter … and I remember thinking, “Heck, it was the Ryder Cup, and not that hard to overlook.” Especially in a year when Fontana and Eisenhower played before 10,000 and a local TV audience in the San Bernardino County Game of the Century.)

So, a 10-6 U.S. lead with one day left, an ESPN columnist declaring the event “over” in a piece that was gleefully linked — and mocked — on this side of the Atlantic. (Thanks for the negative karma, Wojciechowski.)

I am partisan. Sure. I would have liked to see the Yanks win. Especially the guys without major name recognition, like Keegan Bradley and Johnson & Johnson, who did the heavy lifting in the first two days.

But I also concede the Ryder Cup is a bigger deal to the guys over here. Let them celebrate. Yanks are already getting ready for the Monday night football game.