This was something celebrated on at least one Facebook account:

Seeing Star Wars: The Last Jedi today, a day before Everyone Back Home had a chance.

Movies in France tend to open on Wednesday. In the States, an opening often is Friday, especially for big movies like this one. So, at least one of us was feeling, oh …

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Yes, I was the guy who suggested this match could end 4-0, and added 7-0 might be OK if the UAE club held mighty Real Madrid scoreless for, say, a half-hour.

I underestimated Al Jazira, the Arabian Gulf League champions, in a semifinal of the Fifa Club World Cup.

And perhaps Real did, too.

But there it was, Jazira apparently up 2-0 late in the first half, and fans of the Emiratis club were allowed to think the UAE side might actually defeat the 12-time European champions of Modric and Isco and Navas and Ronaldo, et al, and advance to the finals of the global tournament.

Then …

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The MLS Cup needs some help.

Starting with the site of the championship match being decided years in advance and going to the most attractive bid city — in a place where December weather is not predictably nasty.

Why? Because giving the championship match to the team with the best record can yield something that looked as thoroughly unpleasant, and as awkward, as Toronto FC defeating the Seattle Sounders 2-0 on Sunday.

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No.

Really.

Al Jazira of Abu Dhabi and the UAE … will play Real Madrid of Spain in the semifinals of the 2017 Club World Cup on Wednesday night.

In Zayed Sports City, in the capital.

This is the Madrid of Cristiano Ronaldo and 12 European championships.

And the Jazira of Ali Mabkhout, twice champions of the UAE domestic league.

It is a huge moment for Jazira, understandably.

And, to be frank, not the semifinal that Fifa would have preferred.

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Think back to the Los Angeles Rams’ 2016 NFL season.

Prize draft pick Jared Goff was a mess. When he finally got a chance to play, in the final seven games of the season, the rookie quarterback looked clueless and panicked, conditions that rule out competence. And, yes, he was 0-7 as a starter.

The Goff we saw from Week 1 this season, under the guidance of 31-year-old coach/guru Sean McVay, has seemed methodical, cool and confident, with a nice touch on the ball and a fairly high level of accuracy.

It has been a startling makeover and, of course, a welcome one to anyone who remembered the price the Rams paid to move up in the 2016 college draft and take Goff with the first pick. Turns out Goff can be competent. (Sigh of relief.)

But we should not consider Goff as having completed the caterpillar-to-butterfly process, and we offer the final half of the fourth quarter today of the Philadelphia Eagles’ 43-35 over the Rams at the Coliseum.

We saw there a Goff and McVay system that leaves the Rams at risk in high-tension situations.

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The story of Shohei Ohtani just got a bit more fantastical.

The 23-year-old Japanese star who seems to be channeling the spirit of Babe Ruth with his demonstrated star quality as both a pitcher and hitter, has signed with a Major League Baseball team.

And it is not the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox that Ohtani has chosen to join. Not the Los Angeles Dodgers or Chicago Cubs.

It is the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, who in recent seasons had been fading into anonymity among the L.A. market’s glut of major sports franchises, and their coup suggests they may be ready to aspire to be the competitive club they were in the first decade of this century.

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We have watched the mixed herds of sheep and goats in our little town over the past year and a half. Usually from our balcony while they are cropping the grass or leaves in the open land behind the house.

Never was I close enough to them to at least consider how I might evade them if they came running in my direction.

That changed this week.

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Yeah, more LaVar. I don’t plan to do that. But we have so many teachable moments involved here that we feel the gravitational pull … of the worst Basketball Dad in the history of the game.

A Bleacher Report story, by a reporter based in Israel, where European basketball is a big thing, offers little hope for LaVar in his latest plan — to get his two younger sons onto the same European professional team.

In short?

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French music is strange.

France is a large country, with lots and lots of history, including a fair share of celebrated composers of classical music, especially over the past 150 years — Debussy, Ravel, Bizet, Delibes, Offenbach, etc.

But French pop music, at least to the expat’s ear, seems to have ended with Charles Trenet in the post-War years, if not with Edith Piaf, who died in 1963.

When rock and roll appeared on the scene it almost instantly eclipsed the “chanson” stuff of the 1950s and France mostly just waited for foreigners, American and British, in particular, to let them know who was writing and/or recording good music.

That has been the situation for half a century now, with French radio giving lots and lots of air time to imports from the anglophone countries … or to French singers who interpret those songs.

Which is where Johnny Hallyday, the French Elvis, comes in.

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In conversations with journalists, over the years, I have found a common denominator:

A significant percentage of them were thinking about journalism — and even practicing it — at a young age.

This comes to mind after seeing a call from officials of the Mubadala World Tennis Championship, later this month in Abu Dhabi, for a Kiddie Reporter, ages 6 to 14, to cover the tournament.

And, really, that age group is when a lot of us already were journalists in the making.

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