ARLINGTON, Texas — The drum descended the stands like a sanctified relic, passed hand over hand through sections of fans who wouldn’t let it touch the ground.By the time its journey began from the fans gathered in the third deck to the pitch at Dallas Stadium, Norway had already done the hard part: a 2-1 win over Ivory Coast, sealed by Erling Haaland’s 86th-minute winner — the country’s first knockout-round win in its World Cup history.Captain Martin Ødegaard took the drum from the stands, placed it on the grass with his teammates sat behind him, and raised the stick high.What happened next has become familiar to anyone who has followed Norway’s run through this tournament. The crowd above (red and blue, with Viking helmets scattered throughout) needed no instruction. They sat down in their seats, in the aisles. They reached forward, pulled back, and shouted “RO!” in time with the drum, the chant building speed as the beat quickened, arms moving in unison through a stadium full of many people who, a month ago, had no real reason to know what any of this meant.The ritual is called the Viking Row, and it works the same way every time, whether it’s happening on a pitch in Arlington or a subway platform in Queens. Fans sit down in a line, one behind the other, lean back and pull their arms toward their chests in unison, as if hauling an oar through water, while a leader keeps time on a drum and the group chants “ro” — Norwegian for “row” — faster as the beat speeds up.Fans doing the viking row during the sixth inning of a game between the New York Mets and the Chicago Cubs (Ishika Samant/Getty Images)It has done what its creators hoped, giving a country without a World Cup appearance in nearly three decades something simple to rally around. But it has also done something they didn’t fully anticipate: it has become one of the defining images of the North American World Cup, performed by people with no connection to Norway at all.The gesture went viral in the U.S. after a video of Norwegian fans rowing up a Boston escalator gained millions of views. Since then, it’s been done on the floor of a New York City subway car, in the middle of Times Square, and by a section of fans at a Mets game who probably needed a distraction from their team.