Italy defied months of turmoil, several questionable calls and their own over-acting to win the World Cup Final over France on penalty kicks, 5-3. Regulation ended in a 1-1 tie, it remained tied after both the first and second overtimes, then both countries' captains cut a jack off a deck of cards to end the third overtime tied and subsequently threw identical "paper" signals in the quadruple overtime "Rock, Scissors, Paper" competition and force the tie-breaker shootout. After weeks of dramatic, pratfalling attempts to draw fouls on opponents, Italy expierenced an actual foul when French superstar Zinadine Zidane apparently went off his meds and jammed his skull directly into the breastbone of Italian Marco Materazzi, who crumbled like stale biscotti and had to be re-taught how to breathe. Without Zidane the French were undermanned for the shootout, whereas the Italians seemed somewhat surprised they even had a player named Materazzi and were hence fine in the shootout.

Zinedine Zidane's attempt to header Marco Materazzi's chest into next week during Sunday's World Cup final shocked even veteran soccer announcers and forced the Univision Spanish play-by-play man to alter his call from "Gooooooaaal" to "Ouuuuuuuuch!" The question everyone is trying to answer - outside of, "what exactly is the tensile strength of Zidane's skull?" - is what verbiage Materazzi used that clearly helped provoke Zidane into his cannonball impression. No field mics were in play Sunday, but Sportalicious lip-reading experts were in place just on the off chance something like this might happen, and they think it may have come down to Materazzi calling Zidane a "lame-ass 'American Idol' Chris Daughtry wannabee." Prior to that Materazzi ramped up to the comment by apparently calling Zidane "ZZ Bald Top" and "I ran into the lead singer from 'Live' and he said he wants his look back, chuckles."