… but since I’m not in Atlanta, I can just envy those of you who are there. :-)

That was indeed an excellent piece by Orson/Spencer, and pretty much mirrors my own experience with the USMNT. The only exception is that my experience started in 1994 with the incredibly improbable run the team made to the group stage in the World Cup it was hosting for the first time.

(The 1994 World Cup, by the way, was the first, and to date the only, time that every ticket to every game was sold for the entire tournament. And if the United States can draw 76,000+ fans to a soccer match between Saudi Arabia and Morocco at a time when most of the country couldn’t even spell soccer, can you imagine how much wilder it would be if they were awarded the 2022 World Cup, when the game is now incredibly more popular?)

Mainly because of my English wife. We married in ‘98, just after the World Cup. England, which had much promise, goes out in the knockout round largely because a young David Beckham gets red carded against Argentina. My soon-wife-to-be is utterly crushed (we’re watching the whole thing from a hospital room in Miami because the night before she broke her shoulder). My reaction was a bit flip, and soon learned that if this soon-to-be marriage is going to survive, I’d better get on-board with the whole football thing. Yes, dear.

When we made it to the quarterfinals in ’02, I was more than hooked. Not on that watered-down MLS stuff, but real international football. Of course, the USA did not receive much credit abroad; still a fluky thing was the general consensus. 2006 seemed to verify that. What a horrible performance.

Yesterday, I’m sitting in a conference taking notes and watching a terminal powerpoint presentation. I cannot get a 3G signal on my iPhone because of some wierd interference, but understood that the match was getting quite long in the tooth and no result would mean, “go home, Yanks!” The speaker at the podium, almost as an afterthought, paused a second (as if he had an earpiece in his ear) and totally broke protocol when he announced, “I have just learned that Landon Donovan for the U.S. team has scored a goal in extra time.” His audience went nuts, including yours truly. That was really cool to be a part of.

You know, right now it’s really great to be a fan of the game. And right now it’s really great to see this team overcome adversity, despite inept referees who disallowed two sure-fire goals. And right now, we’ve got a gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, an uncertain economy, an unending war among other things to fret over. It’s a wonderful, positive distraction in a historical time of uncertainty. This reminds me alot of 1980. Our nation overcame some adversity that year, too. The Iranian Hostage Crisis was in year 2, we nearly had another energy-related disaster at Three-Mile-Island less than a year before, the economy was in a horrible fix with high unemployment rates just as today. But some good things were happening as well: The Miracle on Ice. And somewhere down in Athens, GA a football team was preparing to do battle in the Fall. Parallels?

USA! USA!

USA!