By VANESSA GERA

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Thousands of young people from around the world had come to Rome expecting to rejoice this weekend in the canonization of the first millennial saint during the Vatican’s Holy Year. They ended up bidding farewell to Pope Francis instead, with their exuberance giving an uplifting tone to Saturday’s otherwise somber funeral.

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“He always said you have to be joyful about life, you have to live life in a similar way,” said Marco Falchi, who traveled from his home near Perugia with his wife and 11-year-old son. He and his wife credit Francis with reviving their spirituality, and they named their son, Francesco, after him.

The family is also devoted to the cause of sainthood for Carlo Acutis, a young Italian who died in 2006 from leukemia and inspired faith in many young Catholics. They planned their trip to Rome around that.

The canonization of Acutis had been scheduled for Sunday during the first-ever Jubilee of Adolescents, dedicated to teens. It was suspended after Francis’ death on Monday.

Falchi was struck by the lack of deep mourning at the funeral for the pope, and he is convinced Francis would have been pleased. “Especially since this was the jubilee for adolescents, he certainly didn’t want a day of mourning but he wanted a day of joy,” he said.

‘I feel like I grew up with Francis’

There was a clear blue sky over St. Peter’s Square. Some people camped out the night before to get a good spot. Many stood respectfully, their hands folded, as they followed the Mass on large screens. Radio broadcasts in multiple languages added to the hum of humanity. They applauded when Francis’ simple wooden coffin was moved outdoors.

Tens of thousands of Catholic faithful had planned their trips before the pope’s death.

“I bought my ticket for Carlo,” said Reyes Arribas, a 23-year-old from Valencia, Spain. “And then suddenly Pope Francis died, so I came to the funeral.”

She confessed that while she admired Francis, she felt a closer affinity to his predecessors, St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Her feelings for Acutis, however, are very strong. She excitedly praised him as “the first saint of young people” because he was immersed in the technological world of today.

Even those who were disappointed by the suspended canonization were gratified that they could celebrate Francis, loved by many for his humility and concern for the poor.

“I feel like I grew up with Pope Francis,” said Jessica Naranjo, a 27-year-old from Austin, Texas. “I felt very connected with him in the way he advocated for social justice and the environment. This was a big loss for me.”

“I”m disappointed that I’m here celebrating the pope’s life instead of celebrating with the pope,” she said.

Ana Kalen, a 22-year-old medical student, traveled to Rome for the Acutis canonization with a group from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“The plans have changed, but we are still so glad to be here for this historical moment,” Kalen said, a Bosnian flag draped over her shoulders. “We are sad about each death. But we do believe that Pope Francis is in a better place.”

Francis resonates with young Catholics

After St. John Paul II died in 2005, the mood was different. The faithful made pilgrimages from his Polish homeland and elsewhere to mourn a towering figure of the 20th century in a spirit of deep sadness and loss.

Francis had a different style. During his 12-year papacy, he urged people to maintain a sense of humor, and that spirit seemed to guide many participants Saturday.

Groups of young people filled St. Peter’s Square before the funeral Mass. One from a parish in Cassano Magnago in the northern Italian province of Varese danced in circle and sang religious songs.

The pope’s death during Easter season filled them with a sense of peace, one teenager said.

“It’s a good sign,” said 16-year-old Matteo Cozzi. “The death of a pope at Easter is a sign of hope.”

The woman born Charlotte Aitchison has been kicking around the music industry since 2008, when she began posting songs online and exploring the London rave scene. It took a while, but she’s finally got to the point where she filled Minneapolis’ Target Center on Saturday night under her stage name Charli XCX.

The 32-year-old landed her first big single in 2012 as a guest on Icona Pop’s “I Love It” (which popped up in her encore) and returned to the charts two years later after she contributed vocals to Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” (which was nowhere to be found Saturday, much like Iggy Azalea’s career). But Charli never really built a substantial following in the States until recently, with her sixth album “Brat” entering the charts at No. 3 last summer. (The record’s purposefully garish lime green cover quickly went viral online and only got hotter when the Kamala Harris campaign adopted the look.)

It’s tempting to lump her in with other current female pop stars like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, but Charli doesn’t have a crossover classic like “Espresso” or “Pink Pony Club” in her repertoire. Instead, she makes polarizing electronic dance songs that are more aggressive and angry than, say, euphoric.

So it was strange to see her largely youthful crowd, with a substantial number of queer people in attendance, dancing and cheering to Charli’s bass-heavy and often discordant songs cursed with vapid lyrics. But the audience turned it into a celebration for the devoted that’s not likely to win over any skeptics.

Charli performed on a massive, stark stage with two large screens and a two-level catwalk that extended into the crowd. There was no live band — she sang to a prerecorded track with plenty of canned vocals on it — or dancers, and the only other person on stage was the occasional camera operator. The set list included nearly all of “Brat” but almost nothing from her early career, not even 2014’s “Boom Clap,” her biggest solo hit. (Then again, many of those in the crowd were still in grade school in 2014.)

Clad in a series of revealing outfits and ever-present wraparound shades, Charli didn’t spend the show dancing as much as she did stomping around, pumping her fist, swearing incessantly and acting more like a hype (wo)man than the main attraction. When she did sing live, it was usually through heavy electronic effects. After a while, watching her onstage felt like scrolling through a particularly tedious Instagram feed full of leering influencers.

Again, the up-for-anything crowd ate up every last minute of what quickly turned into a concert heavy on style and lacking in substance.

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Frankie Capan III opened his rookie season on the PGA Tour with a series of strong performances.

And then the success dried up. And when things start to go bad on the top tour in men’s pro golf, it’s difficult to turn the ship around.

Capan missed six straight cuts entering this week’s Zurich Classic of New Orleans, and was in need of a spark to get his season back on track. He appears to have found that in the form of team golf at TPC Louisiana.

Capan and his partner, Jake Knapp, posted a 12-under round of 60 in the third round of the tournament Saturday in Avondale, Louisiana, to move to 24-under on the week, good for a tie for second. The duo, which will play in the final group in Sunday’s final round, is just three shots back of leaders Andrew Novak and Ben Griffin. That group tees off at 12:55 p.m. Central on Sunday.

Saturday’s format was four-ball, in which both players on the two-man team play their own ball, and the best score between the two on each hole is recorded for the score. Capan birdied eight holes Saturday, while Knapp had eight as the tandem tallied the best score of the day.

“We birdied a lot of opposite holes, so that helped a lot,” Capan told reporters. “I really think we both had a good chance on most every hole, and in a best ball it’s nice to just have a lot of looks at it, and I felt like we did a really good job of just kind of taking care of our own games and making a few putts out there.”

Saturday’s round was likely the best the North Oaks product has played since he finished 12th at The American Express back in mid-January. The 25 year old has struggled with his driver in recent months. Yet he said Saturday he never felt his game was “too far away.”

“I think that’s the unique thing about golf is you could have one weird day or a couple bounces not go your way and think, man, I shot 74, but it really didn’t feel like I played that poorly. I think for me, it’s just a matter of getting more experience,” Capan said. “I always enjoyed learning from people older and more experienced than me, so it’s been great having Jake by my side and just kind of picking his brain and asking him a few things here and there and working on some shots, as well.”

Sunday marks Capan’s first time in the hunt to win a PGA Tour event. And while the team format doesn’t offer Official World Golf Rankings points, there’s a significant amount at stake. The FedEx Cup points are significant. If Capan and Knapp merely held their current position, Capan would climb from 149th to 95th in the season-long standings.

But if the duo was to win, Capan’s career trajectory could be forever changed. Not only would that equal a two-year PGA Tour exemption, but Capan would also automatically be into all of the high-purse, high-point Signature Events over the remainder of the season and earn a spot in next month’s PGA Championship.

That’s a lot to think about heading into Sunday’s final round, which features an alternate shot format in which Capan and Knapp will play the same ball and take turns taking strokes. Thankfully for Capan, he can lean upon Knapp, who just won a PGA Tour event last season in Mexico.

“I think at every level, whether it’s junior golf, amateur golf, Korn Ferry Tour, now PGA Tour, you want to just kind of get comfortable at every stage, and I feel like I’ve been able to
do that better and better the last couple years,” Capan said. “But having Jake by my side has been great. He was helping me with a couple things on the range (Friday), even for some tee shots today that I felt like really helped. I feel like my game felt a lot more clean than it did the first couple rounds. Just going to go work on a few more things and be ready for (Sunday).”

Rookies can add great things to their teams come playoff time. And there are moments where you’re reminded they are rookies.

That was the case for defenseman Zeev Buium on Saturday, after he again showed flashes of the offensive brilliance that made him one of college hockey’s top players as a sophomore at Denver, and took a costly penalty that changed the direction of the game.

With Buium in the penalty box for four minutes, the Golden Knights tied the game, and Buium didn’t see the ice in overtime of the Wild’s loss in Game 4. But after the game, his coach wasn’t making a scapegoat out of the rookie, or anyone.

“I think just more of the situation of some of the guys that we were going with. I think that was the decision we made going through,” John Hynes said about Buium’s limited ice time, although he did play following the penalty. “He was fine after, like we put him right back out, when he got out of the penalty (box). I just thought when we get into overtime, we were going with the guys we went with.”

Wild captain Jared Spurgeon, who has played defense at this level for more than a decade, said that the penalty — which came when Buium inadvertently caught Vegas captain Mark Stone near his eye with a high stick — was unfortunate, but nothing more.

“Unlucky. He didn’t mean to do it,” Spurgeon said. “Nothing you can do. Nothing really to say other than support him.”

In all, Buium logged 13:33 in the game, and was a plus-2. Matt Boldy set a team record for time on the ice by a forward with 33:08, while defenseman Brock Faber played exactly one second less, at 33:07.

Assist from the seventh player

There is a running joke in hockey that attackers on a power play would never know when to release the puck, save for the crowd yelling “shooooooot” whenever there’s an opportunity to test the goalie.

But when the Wild got a vital man-advantage goal late in the second period of Game 3, the audience may have actually been helpful. Knowing that there were less than 10 seconds remaining in the period, Ryan Hartman could hear the crowd yelling for a shot as the puck was coming his way. So, he took a quick glance at the scoreboard just before the pass reached him and saw roughly four seconds with which to work.

Knowing there was no time for a fancy play, Hartman threw the puck toward the goalmouth where it glanced off Kirill Kaprizov’s chest and over the goal line for a 4-1 lead.

“They get it,” Wild coach John Hynes joked afterward. “The seventh man gets the assist on that one.”

Political appeal at the rink

In addition to the highlights, crowd enticements and advertisements shown on the Xcel Energy Center scoreboard between periods, on Saturday there was a QR code posted with an appeal for Minnesotans to contact their legislators and urge their support of public dollars to upgrade the 25-year-old arena.

Wild owner Craig Leipold and St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter testified before the Minnesota Senate and House earlier in the spring, detailing a request for nearly $400 million in state dollars for updates and upgrades not only to the hockey arena but to the adjacent Roy Wilkins Auditorium and RiverCentre convention facility.

A scan of the QR code took visitors to a website where they could sign up for updates on the renovation efforts, noting that the arena complex generates $383 million in local spending and draws 2 million visitors to St. Paul each year.

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