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FRANCE 1, PARAGUAY 0

This game, bumpy and arrhythmic and endlessly unproductive as it was, was a keeper. The goalkeepers saw to that. It was the kind of day where it is important to believe that each missed chance is not the last and where luck becomes as important as endurance.

Before kickoff, Paraguay’s Jose Luis Chilavert pressed his lips against a gold medallion and placed it carefully behind the right post. Fabien Barthez of France inclined his shaved head toward defender Laurent Blanc, who planted a kiss at the very top.

As Sunday’s second-round World Cup match between France and Paraguay stretched scoreless for one half, then two, then one extra period, then most of another–114 tense minutes in all–it appeared that the goalkeepers’ rituals had jinxed their respective nets.

Paraguay wanted it that way. The team’s not-terribly-subtle strategy was a back-kicking, box-jamming blockade that would eventually send the game into penalty kicks.

That, in turn, would provide a showcase for the charismatic Chilavert, the rare keeper who can both stop and fire bullets–he has scored four goals in his international career and more than 30 for various clubs on penalty kicks and free kicks.

But when Blanc finally broke through in the second overtime, scoring the first sudden-death goal under the tournament’s revised rules, it was Chilavert who dived and then crumpled as if he had been shot. His teammates dropped where they stood and lay like toy soldiers scattered across a green carpet.

Chilavert, the captain, got up first. He walked over to one player and then another, patting their shoulders, murmuring into their ears, hoisting them back upright and sending them off the field.

“It may be a `golden goal’ for France, but it feels like a huge black hole for me,” said Paraguayan defender Francisco Arce.

The tall, steady Blanc is a 32-year-old veteran of several top clubs in France, Italy and Spain who now plays for Marseille. Before the tournament began, he had registered his disapproval of the sudden-death method of resolving scoreless deadlocks in knockout rounds, instituted after the 1994 final was decided on penalty kicks.

“I have changed my mind,” said Blanc, who knifed his shot from the right side off Robert Pires’ cross and a header in the box from David Trezeguet that bounced once before it found Blanc’s foot. “It’s tough on the Paraguayan players, but we are through and I am happy.”

It isn’t the first time he has backed off a stand. When Bulgaria knocked France out of the qualifying field for World Cup ’94 in a bitter home loss the previous year, Blanc, sure that he would be cast aside as too old and slow, announced he would retire from international competition.

“Aime (Jacquet, the French coach) found the right words and persuaded me to carry on,” Blanc said. “I don’t regret it.”

France’s 1-0 victory propels the team into a quarterfinal showdown with Italy on Friday at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, north of Paris. The home team has now won all four of its games, scoring 10 goals and allowing just one.

The last two wins have come without playmaker Zinedine Zidane, suspended for two games after a cheap shot administered in France’s first-round match against Saudi Arabia. His absence was evident Sunday, as France’s midfield functioned like a watch with a defective works.

“I think he is the happiest man today that he’ll get to play in the next game,” Jacquet said of Zidane, who will return for the Italy match and who might have been the scapegoat had France failed to advance.

Youri Djorkaeff, anchoring the middle for France, was unable to equal Zidane’s verve and skill at penetrating defenses. But the French muffed what chances they did create, notably when forward Thierry Henry, who later left the game with an ankle injury, hit the post on a first-half breakaway.

Chilavert had a busy afternoon as France took 25 shots on goal compared with Paraguay’s five. Barthez, his counterpart, who looks as if he should be boarding an enemy ship with a sword clenched in his teeth, put out the few grassfires that started around him.

The longer Paraguay held back the French, the more it appeared the South Americans had the momentum in the match.

“Despite the fact that we dominated the game, we didn’t reap the rewards of that domination,” Jacquet said. “We lacked some confidence. It was difficult to find a crack in the Paraguayan wall.”