Mike Celizic

It was exciting – for a half. The United States soccer, which has spent more than 30 years promising to become an international force, was leading Brazil, 2-0, in the final of the Confederations Cup, which, the soccer mavens kept telling me, is a big deal despite the fact that most Americans had probably never heard of it.

It’s too bad the United States didn’t win, if only because of how much fun it would have been to listen to the soccer evangelists telling us how this would be the victory that would take the favorite sport of five-year-olds to major-league status in the United States.

We’ve been hearing that sermon for 34 years, which is how long it’s been since Pele, the Babe Ruth of soccer, signed with the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League and filled Giants Stadium with more than 75,000 fans.

We heard it again when the United States hosted the World Cup in 1994. And again a couple of years ago when David Beckham signed with the Los Angeles Galaxy of the MLS.

Since Pele played on these shores, soccer has become the game of choice for kids, giving the language the term “soccer mom” and making the mini-van a necessity of suburban family life. But by the time all those millions of miniature soccer players get to high school, most of the best athletes among them have taken to basketball and football and, to a lesser degree, baseball. Soccer is a popular high school sport, too, but the centerpiece of fall in high school is football’s homecoming, not soccer. And all the kids who played soccer never seem to morph into soccer fans when they grow up. MLS attendance remains below the level of most basketball teams. And the best American players end up earning big money on club teams in Europe, not in their own home country.

The soccer evangelists wouldn’t have cared. More than any other fans of any other sport, these true believers aren’t content to enjoy their chosen sport in their own way. They feel obliged to lecture the rest of us about what heathens we are because we simply don’t care that much about the sport.

It’s nothing personal. We grew up watching baseball, football, basketball and maybe hockey. Those are the sports that are woven into our neurons from birth. They are the ones that produce the millionaire superstar athletes whose lives are stalked by paparazzi. They are the ones who pitch the products that we rush to buy simply because they get paid millions to wear them.

I grew up in a place and at a time when if you said you enjoyed soccer, other guys would look at you as if you were caught wearing lace underwear. To be fair, most of the people from that farm milieu felt the same about people who played golf and drank scotch.

I’ve come to appreciate the game. I watch the World Cup and the women’s competition in the Olympics. I didn’t watch the Confederations Cup early rounds, but I watched the final and thought it was entertaining enough.

But I’m not a soccer fan, not in the sense of the people who packed the stadium in Johannesburg to watch USA-Brazil. From before the start until after the finish, they jumped up and down and blew trumpets that produced a din that sounded like the place was infested by a swarm of 600-pound hornets. It didn’t seem to matter what was going on down on the field. The racket never stopped or even changed in volume.

It’s as if soccer fans know that for most of a game, they’re going to have to provide their own excitement, because there’s not a lot that’s going to happen on the field. At least not usually.

Sunday’s final was an exception. It was full of action and scoring chances and good saves.

But even to these eyes, it was pretty clear that Brazil was going to win this game. The United States scored two brilliant and opportunistic goals in the first half. But other than those two moments, nearly the entire game had been played in America’s half of the field. Brazil was losing on the scoreboard, but the team of one-name heroes was dominating on the field. It seemed only a matter of time – and a scrunch more effort – before Brazil restored order, which they began to do with the first of three unanswered goals at the beginning of the final 45 minutes.

So in the end, a team that started this tournament with incompetent and lackluster play and needed a whole bunch of lucky breaks to get to the final, learned that it still has a long way to go. Elite teams don’t give up two-goal leads as readily as this crew did.

It remains a historic moment for U.S. soccer, which had never before played in the final of an international FIFA event. There is no question that it is an important step. But in showing its strengths, this team also exposed its weaknesses.

And in the end, nothing has changed. A lot of Americans got excited about the match and watched their only soccer match of the year. When it was over, soccer fans went home buzzing about how this is going to help change everything, just like Pele and the World Cup and Beckham were going to do.

And nothing will change. Come Monday morning, we’ll be back to talking about baseball and looking forward to football.

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