Before Siphiwe Tshabalala’s rocket from his left foot, before Peter Drury’s iconic commentary, before the wall of noise from thousands of vuvuzelas and before Shakira’s Waka Waka, there was Philip.

From the moment Sepp Blatter pulled out an envelope with the words “South Africa” inside on 15 May 2004, cynics voiced their scepticism. The country was deemed too dangerous to host a World Cup finals tournament. There were concerns about public transport, about power outages and stadiums that weren’t up to scratch. Could South Africa really pull this off?

To combat this, just about every sector in South Africa rallied behind the cause. For six years supermarkets brandished World Cup paraphernalia. Cars were adorned with South African flags. Airports were rebuilt, roads widened, stadiums rose from the dust. And driving this overwhelming sense of hope and national pride was a tagline created by the public broadcaster that encouraged all South Africans: “Feel it. It is here.”

Feel it. We certainly did. We wore golden Bafana Bafana jerseys to work on Fridays. Sports fans who had had eyes only for the Springboks or Proteas were suddenly invested in the local Premier Soccer League. This mantra helped to summon a collective spirit that we soon personified. “Feel it” morphed into Philip, the soul of this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Philip was everywhere.

Philip was absurd, of course. But he was also useful. He gave shape to something we could not quite explain. South Africa in 2010 was a place of contradictions: suspicious of itself and its leaders and their empty promises. We knew better than to believe too easily. We had been let down too often. But still, in the weeks before the tournament, something loosened. People who rarely shared public space without the old codes of race and class intruding now seemed to be moving to the same beat.

I watched the opening game at a fan park on the beach in Durban with my family and my best mate. The air was warm and salty. There was colour everywhere. And then there was the sound. You cannot talk about that World Cup without talking about the sound. The vuvuzela might have been a nuisance on TV, but to feel it wash over you was almost spiritual. Those plastic horns, droning like bees, turned the air into something physical, as if Philip himself had taken breath.

The game began as opening games often do. It was tight and awkward, but it was clear Mexico were the better team. Only the brilliant keeper Itumeleng Khune, and a disallowed goal, kept them out. South Africa escaped to half-time fortunate to be all square.

Nine minutes after the restart Mexico lost the ball in midfield and, three slick South African passes later, Kagisho Dikgacoi was striding forward, unfurling a gorgeous, defence-splitting ball for the galloping Tshabalala down the left. His first touch narrowed the angle inside the box. His second sent the ball exploding past Óscar Pérez and into the far top corner. For a moment there was disbelief. Then South Africa erupted. In Soccer City, on the Durban beach, in townships, suburbs, shebeens and lounges, the country lost its mind. I remember leaping into the arms of strangers, staring into their faces for confirmation that this was real.

“Goal Bafana Bafana! Goal for South Africa! Goal for all Africa!” Drury cried, finding in that instant the words for what the rest of us were feeling. “Jabulile! Rejoice!” Tshabalala and several teammates broke into a rehearsed celebration, all rhythm and joy, a country briefly in sync.

Football is rarely kind enough to let a fairytale remain untouched. Rafael Márquez equalised with 11 minutes left, free at the back post. Then Katlego Mphela struck the woodwork when, in another life, the Durban fan park lifts clean off the sand and floats into the Indian Ocean. Instead it ended South Africa 1-1 Mexico. Not a win, but not a defeat.

The rest of the tournament seemed to fly by. South Africa were poor against Uruguay and were trounced 3-0. They then beat a French team in turmoil 2-1, but still became the first host nation to fail to reach the knockout stage. The party continued, but our role in it changed. We were no longer the protagonists. We became hosts, opening our arms to everyone else’s drama.

So we rallied behind the African teams. And when Ghana emerged as the continent’s last hope, Bafana Bafana gave way to BaGhana BaGhana. When Luis Suárez handled on the line and Asamoah Gyan’s penalty struck the bar, the heartbreak felt personal. And then it was over.

The days after Andrés Iniesta’s winning strike in the final felt numb. The vuvuzelas fell quiet. The flags on car mirrors began to fray and fade. The decorations across the country slowly decayed. The stadiums remained, beautiful and expensive, some already beginning their transformation into white elephants. The questions we had postponed came back. What had it cost? Who had benefited? What had been hidden beneath the pageantry?

In time came the denied corruption allegations around the bid. The stories of alleged bribes and compromised officials. The allegations linking criminal figures to construction projects. That familiar self-doubt returned: that sense that even our most beautiful moments had been skimmed, brokered, monetised and stolen from the inside.

And now, with the country pockmarked by xenophobic violence, with the economy still reeling from years of waste and theft under Jacob Zuma, and with inequality as stubborn as ever, it is fair to ask what any of it meant. What did that month change? Did it feed us? Did it heal the country? Or did it merely dress up our wounds in flags and sell the pictures to the world?

The honest answer is that it fixed nothing. No goal could. South Africa’s problems are too deep, too old, too structural to be solved by a football match, even one watched by the world. The rainbow nation was always more aspiration than fact. In 2010, we did not become a different country. We became, briefly, the best version of the country we wished we could be.

But that is not nothing. Because nations need proof of their possibility. And its people need moments they can point to and say “we were there”, and “that was us”. Not the corruption, not the violence, not the queues outside labour offices. Together, loud, ridiculous, alive.

Now South Africa and Mexico meet again, in another World Cup opener, this time in Mexico City. The symmetry is almost too neat. Sixteen years on, Bafana Bafana will step into someone else’s attempt to make a tournament mean more than football. Inevitably, for South Africans of a certain age, the fixture will tug us back to that winter afternoon in 2010. Back to the Durban beach with sand between our toes and flags painted on our faces.

Back to Philip and what he meant to us. Back to a left foot swinging through the ball and a country rising with it. The World Cup did not save South Africa. But for one impossible second, as that ball flew into the top corner, it showed us the country we wanted to be. For all that followed, we will always have that goal.