Scrappy squad inspires love & makes us truly UNITED States

There are a handful of people who know what it is like when you have the country rooting for you the way it is rooting right now for the United States team that advanced to the knockout round in the World Cup, on this day when you really did feel the whole country had gone to this soccer game, even one we lost.

Mike Eruzione, the captain of the U.S. hockey team that beat the Soviets at the Olympics in 1980 and went on to win the gold medal, the man who scored the goal that beat the Soviets one Friday night in Lake Placid, is one who understands deeply what this is like, the way his teammates from Lake Placid know.

“You never expect it,” Eruzione said, “and you never realize the force of it until it happens to you. This isn’t the Rangers against the Kings, or the Red Sox against the Yankees. It becomes a different event when you put on the jersey with “U.S.A.” on the front. Then you’re in a different spectrum. And believe me, the guys on that soccer team know.”

Eruzione said, “Now, I’m the one doing the cheering instead of getting cheered by the rest of the country. I can remember when our women won the World Cup that time. I felt like I wanted to jump through my television.”

And Jim Craig, the goalie on that team, one who famously skated around looking for his dad with an American flag draped over his shoulders, told me this on Thursday: “What you love more than anything is seeing the U.S.A. spirit.”

A friend of mine, from another sport, was talking to me the other day about the TV ratings the World Cup is getting, the way the ratings for U.S. games have been like a rocket to the moon. And my friend wasn’t buying that sports fans in America have suddenly developed a love affair for soccer.

“This isn’t about soccer,” he said, “as much as it’s about America.”

He was probably right about that. We agree on hardly anything in this country, with the possible exception of wanting to see somebody stick a sock in Dick Cheney’s mouth. We sometimes seem hopelessly divided about everything, the way politicians in Washington are divided about everything, divided about war and guns and immigration and

abortion and same-sex marriage, the lines on those issues drawn as deeply — and sometimes as bitterly — as they have ever been.

Suddenly, though, there is this American team playing in a competition more famous and important to the rest of the world than the Olympics. That team brings us to these games, and it brings us together. It is a good thing.

People watched this game on TV, starting at noon on Thursday, in huge numbers again. They watched it at work on their laptops and on their cell phones. They took long (liquid) lunches and watched in bars. They watched in City Hall Plaza in Boston and Grant Park in Chicago and Dupont Circle in Washington and Wall Street Plaza in Orlando. Or they listened on their radios. President Obama watched on Air Force One on his way to Minnesota.

It was like that in the middle of the day for most of the country, or in the morning on the West Coast. Sports can still do that sometimes, did it because of World Cup soccer on this day when the U.S. lost 1-0 to Germany, but still advanced from the “Group of Death” into the knockout round. A win or a tie against Germany would have given the U.S. an automatic pass into the next round, but they got a little help when Portugal beat Ghana.

We make way too much of sports sometimes. But it still has the ability to make us feel the way we did with this game between the United States and Germany, the way we felt on Sunday night when it was the U.S. breaking ratings records for its own game against Portugal.

“For as long as it lasts,” my old friend Michael Eruzione said from Pittsburgh on Thursday, “this is one of those moments.”

We can agree upon that, even if this is another World Cup when a U.S. team gets knocked out in its first game in the knockout round. We can agree on the moment, what it does feel like rooting for this team, for Jurgen Klinsmann, the coach who is as much a part of the story as any of his players; for captain Clint Dempsey and the goalkeeper, Tim Howard, and a center back named Omar Gonzalez who played the game of his life against Germany, even in defeat.

And there is Michael Bradley and Graham Zusi and Jermaine Jones, Besler and Beckerman and Beasley and Brooks and all the rest. We can agree on them right now as we watch these games.

“It just happens like this sometimes,” Eruzione said. “We feel like when they win, we win.”

Sports can’t fix the world, or change the world. But it can still do that.