Remember the World Cup? Streets closed to cars, joyful crowds, downtown exuberance. Wasn’t that great? It was, it was.

The Seattle Convention Center certainly thought so. That was the inspiration behind its Market at the Marquee event. All through August, the Convention Center shut down Ninth Avenue between Pike and Pine streets to host a weekly night market and pedestrian fair outside the Paramount Theatre.

There was music and vendors and food and there were no cars and — crucially — the Convention Center painted the street to make the environment more pleasant, more enticing, more vibey.

But now August has come and gone, it’s been three weeks since the last night market, and the street is still closed.

The paint won’t come off.

And until it does, the Seattle Department of Transportation says, the street cannot reopen.

This is not the busiest block in downtown Seattle. It’s often partially blocked by buses and trucks parked outside the Paramount, unloading musical acts and their gear. But its closure has blocked an entrance to the Interstate 5 express lanes. That entrance is still accessible from Pike Street, but drivers headed west on Pine (or south on Ninth) now have to circle around a couple of blocks to get on the highway.

KIRO Newsradio first reported the snafu.

The street was painted with 35 circles, in red, yellow, blue and green, and five thick white lines, running almost the length of the block.

It looks kind of like a guitar fretboard, with the colored circles indicating potential finger placement.

“During the World Cup, we witnessed the power of shared experiences to bring people together and energize downtown Seattle,” Convention Center President and CEO Jennifer LeMaster said in July, when the event was announced. “This activation is an opportunity to continue creating those moments.”

But the white lines also kind of look like lane lines, albeit with lanes that are too numerous and too narrow. You can see how it could cause confusion.

“The event organizer is currently working to remove paint from the pavement,” Ethan Bergerson, an SDOT spokesperson, wrote in an email. “This is a requirement of their permit which must happen before the street can reopen.”

Evidence of those efforts are visible. Fourteen of the painted circles have been entirely or partially removed from the asphalt, their former presence still marked by varying levels of discoloration.

“The best laid schemes of mice and men,” the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, decades before the first asphalt roads, “go oft awry / And leave us nothing but grief and pain.”

Most of the circles, and all the lines, remain.

Bergerson said SDOT is not currently planning any penalties for the Convention Center (which paid $83 for the street closure permit), because it’s engaging with SDOT and making an “earnest effort” to reopen the street as quickly as possible.

“The temporary pavement markings applied as part of an art installation have proven more difficult to remove than anticipated,” Loni Syltebo, a Convention Center spokesperson, wrote in an email Thursday. “We are working closely with SDOT and our contractors on a solution and remain in regular communication with affected neighbors and businesses.”

Syltebo said they used two types of paint on the street — Sherwin-Williams Forte and Sherwin-Williams Pro-Park.

Both are acrylic. Neither advertises itself as temporary.

Forte, which includes urethane for extra strength, bills itself as for both interior and exterior surfaces offering “exceptional adhesion, outstanding durability, and resistance to corrosion.”

Pro-Park is specifically designed for pavement and parking lots. It comes in only five colors — white, yellow, blue, “firelane red” and black.

“I thought the Pro-Park’s coverage was very good, it flowed down into the pores of the asphalt real easy,” a pavement painter says in a Sherwin-Williams promotional video.

Syltebo said they’ve tried both Taginator graffiti remover (“The world’s best graffiti remover for stone and masonry surfaces,” the company says) and heated pressure washers to get the paint off.

They’re still working on it.

Neither SDOT nor the Convention Center offered a timeline for getting the street reopened.