SANTA CLARA, Calif. — What’s been the most vicious sporting event America has hosted for its 250th birthday?

Did you think it was that UFC card on the White House lawn?

Wrong.

It was the Australia-Paraguay World Cup match in Santa Clara on Thursday night.

While the rest of this soccer-loving country — and, let’s be honest, the world — was watching the United States and Turkey score goals (how boring) in Los Angeles, the real sickos were focused on the South Bay, where the beautiful game went to die a violent, effectively unofficiated death.

Goals? Don’t be daft. The only real scoring chances arrived in the dying moments of a game that carried macabre tendencies, long after the match had devolved into a turf war.

Instead of tiki-taka, we got a masterclass in southern hemisphere hacking and relentless pragmatism. We got clearance kicks zipped into the stands with enough velocity to decapitate a casual fan.

Seriously, that almost happened twice.

The combined expected goals for the entire match? A microscopic 0.83. Australia managed a whopping 14 touches in the opposing penalty box; Paraguay mustered six.

But spreadsheets can’t measure spite. They don’t track the two-footed slide tackles that flew in every 60 seconds, or the body checks that broke advertising boards and left players curled up in the fetal position.

There was no diving here; no, this was earnest, earned writhing on the grass — medically justified.

“I think quite a few of us (have) been hit in the head,” Australia midfielder Aiden O’Neill said after the match.

All that was missing from the game was a rusty shiv in the center circle.

Forty-four total tackles, zero artistic merit and a sterling pregame rendition of Men At Work’s “Down Under.” It was a magnificent show.

And thank goodness this football masochism was merely the appetizer for the Bay’s main course.

The Bay Area was handed, unquestionably, the worst slate of group-stage games FIFA’s bureaucrats could manifest — five equivalents of a Tuesday night MACtion football game in a November blizzard.

And yet, Northern California ate it up. The house was full every single night, with only 1,617 empty seats tallied across those five matches over the past two weeks.

The soccer gods, inherently fickle and usually corrupt, actually rewarded that blind devotion.

They gave us the big show.

The United States men’s national team is coming to the South Bay.

The Americans will host Bosnia and Herzegovina next Wednesday at 5 p.m. at Levi’s Stadium — sorry, Blank Stadium — to kick off the World Cup’s knockout stage.

This is where the true tournament of the best tournament in the world begins — where the safety nets are officially removed, where every kick is vital, and every blade of grass is earned.

Stress? You haven’t felt it until you’ve had a team in this kind of fight.

It’s a scene that hits the region once every three decades, a premier sporting holiday that was never guaranteed to land on our doorstep.

And the Bay earned this. We paid premium prices for tickets, endured the bizarre traffic (even by Bay Area standards), and cheered for tactical disaster classes, parked buses and Thursday night’s no-goal bloodbath like it was the pinnacle of human achievement.

We weren’t wrong about it, either.

Now, the reward for that support arrives.

The golden generation of American men — Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie, Tyler Adams and the rest of the Group D winning crew — live and surrounded by red, white and blue in the home of the red and gold.

It can’t get here soon enough.

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