Since Saturday, sportswriters have fallen all over themselves to come
up with superlatives to describe the US team's accomplishment.
The reason for this? Their realization -- and
shock -- that something that they, the media, had hyped, actually lived up
to expectations.
Heads are scratched raw in the newsrooms at the
thought that soccer, as a sport, may be finally coming into its own in America.
Beyond this, they try to come up with what it
means.
Well, here's what it means.
Something shifted Saturday, within the brutal
bastions of spectator sports. Soccer -- specifically the women's game --
became socially acceptable to watch.
But even that doesn't matter when compared to
what it meant to all the young fans. To all the soccer-playing girls, who
played for the sheer joy of the game, fully knowing that the sport led nowhere
after college: they now see that their sport actually does lead somewhere,
to potential victory, adulation, even national glory.
Fans given 'goals'
Who'd have thought that something they already
were doing -- playing for the sheer joy of it -- could lead to this? Every
player on the 1999 World Champion US Team started that same way. Each one
was once a little girl on a school pitch, playing for family and friends.
Brandi Chastain's goal thus becomes something
enduring. The victory becomes something beyond all the generic Super Bowl
and World Series championships that seem to blur and blend together through
the years.
America's win gives these millions of young
women a new goal in life.
It is their destiny, should they choose to take
it.
