“When we started, it wasn’t really imaginable to play a World Cup at home. We didn’t have a hockey stadium or anything.”Alexander Hendrickx, one of the finest drag-flickers of this generation, says it almost matter-of-factly.The men’s final will be played at the Belfius Hockey Arena in Wavre, Belgium’s brand-new national hockey stadium. It was inaugurated only in April, five years after the country became Olympic champions, eight years after they won the World Cup, and barely a generation after watching Belgium at a World Cup or Olympics was, for many of its players, a distant dream.That is the strange, slightly sobering arc of Belgian hockey.The players arrived before the infrastructure did. The results came before the recognition. And for a sport that once struggled to get on television in Belgium, the country is now preparing to put it on the world’s screens.When Arthur Van Doren, the two-time FIH World Player of the Year, was growing up, the national team did not feel particularly close to him. Belgium could qualify for the Olympics and World Cups, but it was hardly a regular presence at the sharp end of international hockey. The idea of watching his country play on the biggest stages felt remote. “When we were very young, it wasn’t something that felt close to us,” Van Doren, who plays for Vedanta Kalinga Lancers in the Hockey India League, says. “But as a kid, you dream of the impossible.”He and his generation eventually turned that impossible into reality. But the ecosystem around them was slower to catch up.Story continues below this adOnline petitionIn 2009, Belgian hockey players and supporters launched an online petition calling for more coverage from Flemish public broadcaster VRT. The national team had been to the Beijing Olympics, but hockey remained largely invisible outside its own club and playing community. The timing is striking now. Many of the children growing up around then are the players who will walk out at Wavre this month.Belgium did have a substantial hockey base. By 2012, the federation said membership had doubled over the previous decade to 30,000. But the sport lacked the cultural footprint of some of its neighbours, particularly the Netherlands. It also lacked the kind of infrastructure that tends to accompany sporting success.Also Read | Indian hockey’s heavy lifter: Sushila Chanu’s decade at the top and still hereVan Doren, who also played tennis, remembers that even choosing hockey could raise eyebrows. “A lot of people said I was crazy,” he says.Tennis, he says, was far more established and understood. Hockey was less visible, less valued and, at least then, harder to imagine as a serious sporting career. Van Doren also felt Belgium lagged behind Germany and the Netherlands in recognising the role sport could play in children’s education and development. He chose hockey anyway. He loved the team sport, the camaraderie and, simply, the game.Big winsThen came the results.Story continues below this adBelgium finished fifth at the 2014 World Cup in the Netherlands. Won a silver in Rio in 2016. In 2018, the Red Lions became world champions for the first time. Three years later, in Tokyo, they became Olympic champions. The country that once struggled to make the biggest tournaments had become one of hockey’s defining teams.And still, it did not have a proper national hockey stadium. That changed in Wavre.The old Justin Peeters Stadium was rebuilt into the Belfius Hockey Arena, with two pitches and a permanent capacity of 4,000. For the World Cup, temporary stands will increase that to 10,000. After the tournament, the stands will come down and the arena will return to its everyday purpose: a home for Belgian national teams, youth development and local clubs.The stadium itself is also a neat metaphor for Belgian hockey itself. The sport has spent years punching above the weight of its infrastructure. Now the infrastructure is finally catching up.Story continues below this adHendrickx, Van Doren’s teammate at Vedanta Kalinga Lancers, has spoken to some of the older players who retired after the Paris Olympics. Their reaction to the new stadium and a home World Cup was revealing. “They were like, ‘Oh my God, we just stopped and they’ve built a stadium and there’s a World Cup at home,’” he says. “They were pretty jealous.”They have reason to be. The golden generation of Belgian hockey — which delivered unlike their football counterparts — has played more in Bhubaneswar than Belgium. They now have a place they can call home.And the World Cup offers Belgium something else it has rarely had: a chance to introduce hockey to people who have never really paid attention to it. Hendrickx expects family, friends and plenty of people unfamiliar with the sport to fill the stands.“The media coverage will be good, and a lot of people who don’t know hockey yet will come and watch and support us,” he says. “Hopefully we can give them a good result back.”Story continues below this adIf the last decade has taught Belgian hockey anything, it’s that results tend to take care of themselves.