There aren't too many cities in the world where they know how to party like they do in Kinshasa, and Kinshasa hasn't seen too many parties bigger than it did on Tuesday night.
The evening didn't erupt at once, the confetti waiting until the final whistle, as the Democratic Republic of Congo played hard until the end -- and the narrowest 1-0 extra-time victory over Jamaica -- to prevail in the FIFA Inter-confederation playoff and take one of the last tickets going to the 2026 World Cup.
The final whistle launched a carnival. Heard on shortwave radios across the country, from Kananga to Kisangani, from Lubumbashi to Likasi, hailed from balcony to balcony, toasted with lotoko across the ngandas and the buvettes of the capital.
As the rattle of the Congolese rumbas and ndombolos played accompaniment to country-wide celebrations, there was no one across the DRC who was left unaware that the national team had done it. The Leopards were back in the big time, and Africa's 10th country to compete in June.
The Congolese defeated Jamaica in a playoff that was about more than just qualification, it was an opportunity for this nation -- the fallen giants of the African game -- to reopen history and ultimately, hopefully, rewrite it.
So, 52 years is a long time to wait to correct an injustice.
Ghosts can follow sports teams, just ask any Congolese football fan. These aren't apparitions in white, however, but ghosts dressed in green, with giant leopards emblazoned on their chest, go by the name of Zaire, and float aimlessly across the fields of 1974 West Germany.
The world remembers humiliation; and the scoreline, the disarray, the caricatured naivety of that team have become the global byword for DRC football at the top level.
The freekick incident against Brazil, when Mwepu Ilunga impetuously hoofed the ball clear before Brazil had even taken the set piece, has been replayed so many times that it has become utterly detached from its context and exists now only as farce.
Zaire, Africa's first sub-Saharan representatives at the World Cup, have become not pioneers, but a cautionary tale.
What the world does not remember, however, is what came before the '74 World Cup. In the years before that tournament, the late 60s and early 70s, Zaire were no punchline, they were formidable.
Twice they were Africa Cup of Nations champions -- in 1968 and 1974 -- and produced players of genuine quality, of discipline and invention, from the 'Black Beckenbauer' Tshimen Bwanga to Kazadi Mwamba, from Lobilo Boba to AFCON '74 top scorer Ndaye Mulamba.
Barring only the great Ghana team of the 60s, this was the finest African national side there had been to that point, populated by players who understood the game's rhythm, and transformed this former Belgian colony into a genuine continental power.
But football was only a pawn in a broader power play, rather than power in and of itself. Head of state Mobutu Sese Seko's regime demanded more than on-field victories, it demanded symbolism, as the country's first president sought to define an identity for the new nation away from -- and directly in opposition to -- Belgian occupation and imperial rule.
Under his doctrine of authenticité, the country previously known as Congo-Léopoldville turned inwards, renaming itself, renaming its people, renaming its reality. Identity became performance directed from above, with Mobutu ordering, for example, citizens to abandon their European-Catholic first names and took African names instead.
Football, invariably, was drawn into this quest to build a top-down 'indigenous' 'authentic' national identity for this new nation state.
The national team were more than a team, they were proof that Zaire could stand alone, could compete, could excel. They were proof that nothing else was needed from Belgium, from Europe, they stood on their own two feet, a new nation, a legitimate nation, and a country equal to any other.
But isolation can be a lonely and fragile architecture. It's one thing reaching the pinnacle of the African game, but proved another thing entirely to collide with three strong teams at the World Cup in '74.
They arrived carrying expectations -- if not demands from Mobutu -- too heavy to survive contact with reality, specifically Brazil, Scotland and Yugoslavia.
Preparation was chaotic, promises to players went unfulfilled, bonuses not forthcoming, allegations of corruption, morale slowly eroded, and when the matches kicked off, Zaire collapsed.
These losses weren't just losses, the Central Africans were ultimately exposed. Scotland were comfortable in winning 2-0 in Dortmund, the match wrapped up soon after the half-hour mark.
Against Yugoslavia, they were ravaged; 5-0 down inside half an hour, before tumbling to a 9-0 demolition in Gelsenkirchen. At the time, it was the joint-biggest defeat in the tournament's history -- equalling Hungary's battering of South Korea in Zurich 20 years earlier -- since surpassed only by Hungary's 10-1 mauling of El Salvador in 1982.
Next up, Brazil, defending champions, and while a 3-0 loss isn't a humiliation, the game was overshadowed by Ilunga's decision to run out of a defensive wall and smash the ball away up field before the Selecao were able to take a freekick.
Jaizrzinho and Roberto Rivelino looked on bemused, and the moment entered World Cup folklore.
The world loves a straightforward narrative, it doesn't wait before judging; the context didn't matter, the pressure, the threats from Mobutu and his officials accompanying the camp in the case of poor performance.
It became easier to belittle, to ridicule Zaire, for Ilunga's rash clearance, for their 0-14 record, to laugh at the hapless Congolese on the grandest stage of all.
But Zaire were grossly mischaracterised by that Yugoslavia thrashing, or that single incident against a legendary Brazil side. It didn't matter. What followed was a low and insidious decline.
The team that had become Africa's first at the World Cup, embodying continental ambition during this post-colonial period, became a relic of a misinterpreted peak. Infrastructure decayed, administration fractured, the Golden Generation faded away, and the country lost any sense of momentum it had once threatened to enjoy as Mobutu's reign descended into an all-too-familiar tailspin of nepotism and corruption.
The country was again renamed, reoriented, but never recaptured the magic of that double-AFCON-winning team. Zaire's spiritual successor, the DR Congo, became Africa's ultimate fallen giant, once dignified, now disorderly, definitively in decline.
Occasionally, stars emerged, but rarely enough to build anything like a menacing team. The influence of the country's club sides -- themselves continental champions in the same era as the national team conquered the continent -- waned in African club comps, and the country stalled amidst an extensive talent and brain drain to Europe and beyond.
And so the ghosts wearing green remained.
Each failed AFCON campaign, each thwarted qualification, and the years between Zaire 1974 and redemption grew and grew. Congo never managed to shake that long-standing first impression, an identity imposed from the outside that became internalised.
This should have been a glorious legacy, a team which should have inspired its successors, instead, it became a joke to be shaken off, and one day overwritten.
However, as the Lingala proverb goes, 'It doesn't matter how long the night is, the morning will always come. 'Butu atako ewuneli suka tongo eko tana'.
Now, they have the opportunity to do just that, but it's not just the country's name -- or the fact they now wear blue -- that has changed since the country's halcyon days.
Under French head coach Sebastien Desabre, the DRC have embraced their diaspora, bolstering and reinforcing their ranks dramatically in the process.
While Mobutu turned inwards as he sought to write history with Zaire, Desabre has looked outwards to write a new chapter with the DRC. Desabre's Congo have embraced multiplicity and accepted that the country's story is no longer restricted to its borders.
Players came from Belgium, from France, from Switzerland. Some spoke Lingala fluently, some had never set foot in Kinshasa. Some knew the weight of 1974, others felt it merely as a distant echo.
What mattered for the Frenchman was connection, a team formed from many places, not 'just' from one, forged of many experiences, different understandings of how to play football, of how to represent Congo.
Despite a run to the semifinals of the 2025 AFCON, there hasn't been the dominance, the flair of the early 70s, the Jamaica match was a slog, but with that extra-time victory, there has been a return to the big time, and an opportunity to write new history.
In '74, expectation distorted reality, now, there is a sense of proportion, both in the measured, humble approach of the team -- ranked 46th in the world -- and in the electric fervour of Tuesday's street parties.
It was one of the diaspora players, a new arrival since Desabre's appointment, who secured their World Cup ticket; Burnley's Axel Tuanzebe, a former England youth international, was raised in Rochdale, in the foothills of the English Pennines, after emigrating from the DRC with his family when he was a child.
When the final whistle came, it did not erase the past, nothing can, but it gives the Leopards the opportunity to rectify the misconceptions that have lingered for 52 years.
Now, the DRC returns to the World Cup not as a symbol imposed from above, nor as an isolationist state seeking to prove itself, but as a nation reconnected, to itself, to its sons and daughters around the world.
The injustice of 1974 was never purely the results -- horrendous as they were -- but the reduction of complex footballing story to a single, distorted, racist image. It was the forgetting of what the team had been, and the ignoring of what they might have become had the context been tweaked.
Now, this embattled nation, the fallen giants of the African game, have the opportunity to show their true, new identity for the world to recognise them.