I am fascinated by those moments in sports when naive aspirations and expectations collide with reality.

These happen on the field of play, when the impressions framed at practice and training intersect with the skill and determination of a superior opponent in a real game.

In the U.S., you see this most often with American high school and college football teams, where weeks of practicing against each other (but not actual full-speed games) generally leads to a certainty that “we are pretty good; we’ve got guys no one can cover!”

Then comes Game 1, and all those internally multiplied conclusions that “our best guys are really good because they’re better than the rest of us” are shown to have no bearing on how your best guys compare to someone else’s best guys. And the subsequent defeat, often a heavy defeat, comes with instant disillusion and deflation and scapegoating.

So it was when the UAE opened Group B play in Asian Football Confederation World Cup qualifying. A sort of countrywide assumption that the national team would roll right over Kuwait, the visitors, was exploded by a really good Kuwait team.

Often, it doesn’t take long for that towering edifice of overconfidence to crumble. In the case of the UAE and Kuwait, about five minutes sufficed.

From the kickoff, Kuwait clearly played at a far higher rate of speed than did the UAE, and not only that, the Kuwaitis were able to play under control at that far higher rate of speed.

That sort of realization is a key part of the explosion of false assumptions.  On an American football field, it comes with looking up at an opponent who is bigger and, you soon find out, stronger than you are. It comes when your bread-and-butter play is stuffed on first down.

In soccer, it comes when the left-side midfielder in the headband blows past his opposite number, and then the UAE right back is losing any pretense of “cool” in desperately trying to keep up with the guy, putting his head down for a dead sprint … perhaps after looking up and noticing that the stupid-fast guy in the headband isn’t alone in slicing into a defense he thought was really good.

In the case of the UAE, their inner narrative for how this round of AFC qualifying was going to go: Win at home against Kuwait, beat Lebanon twice, try to take a point from South Korea in two games, and presumably draw at Kuwait to secure second place in the group and advance to the final round of group play for Brazil 2014.

When Kuwait scored in the seventh minute, all that pretty much went “poof.” The UAE has severe trouble scoring against competent sides, home or away, and now it was going to have to chase the game against a team everyone knew would punish them on the counterattack and, well, this was going to be hard.

Kuwait scored again in the 51st minute, a bomb from 35 yards out that a better keeper perhaps could have pushed away, and again in the 65th minute, after a breakdown in the back against a tiring defense … and that was it.

The UAE scored two fluke-ish goals in the final 10 minutes, after Kuwait took out one of its interior defenders to save him for the match with South Korea on Tuesday. Reducing the goal-differential from minus-3 to minus-1 was no small thing for the Emiratis, but it will come into play only if the UAE can somehow amass as many points as Kuwait after having surrendered three points to the Kuwaitis at home.

The UAE’s fans, notoriously front-runners, had been somehow induced to turn out 8,000 strong for the match (a big crowd, in this country), at the oasis city of Al Ain, and about half of them left when it was 3-0. Others stuck around to abuse the Slovenian guy who coaches the team, telling him to “go home” and such.

I understand that inside the heads of athletes is a resistance to the idea of, “wow, those guys are just better than we are” … but that is exactly what we saw on the field. Kuwait boasted four guys with real skill in the attack, and the UAE had no one like that. Kuwait was faster. Kuwait was more creative. Some of the UAE’s best guys basically disappeared.

The UAE reached this place — “We’re pretty good, and we will beat Kuwait and get out of this group” — based on positive results in friendlies, and on the addition of several promising players from the Olympic (Under 23) team.

But friendlies are hardly more accurate predictors than are NFL exhibition games, and a mastery of the Under-23 realm means nothing in a game matching senior national sides.

Thus, in two hours on a hot Friday night in the desert, the UAE’s hopes of reaching the World Cup finals for the first time since 1990 were pretty much cut off at the knees. It seemed entirely prudent to abandon notions of “Brazil 2014” and begin thinking of “Russia 2018.”

And as big a disappointment as that was, it was only compounded by the knowledge that four years ago what was perceived to be a lesser UAE side had, at least, made it to the final round of group play in AFC qualifying.

This team will not make it that far. Not unless a supremely impressive Kuwait side somehow fails to beat puny Lebanon twice, and the UAE takes a point or two off of South Korea (which is a World Cup regular, these days), and then the UAE goes over to Kuwait City in November and beats the Kuwaitis on their home turf with the same guys who couldn’t measure up in Al Ain.

It’s hard, this shattering of expectations.  Many teams never overcome it. The UAE plays in Beirut on Tuesday, and we will see if this team suddenly bottoms out, and the players mail it in and the coach is sacked … or if they have the resolve to take care of Lebanon, and figure out ways to somehow salvage this situation, with five games to play.

Here is the on-deadline commentary I wrote on the 3-2 game for The National, and here is the game story by my colleague Amith Pasella.