Let's keep our heads here.
Let's not fool ourselves into thinking Sunday's pulse-pounding soccer -- the long-suffering U.S. nationals only one hard header from winning the Confederations Cup in South Africa -- will dramatically change the game's fortunes on U.S. soil.
For most American sports fans, come next week it'll be back to the old standbys: fireworks and baseball, NASCAR and apple pie. Those fans I heard at Dodger Stadium on Sunday -- the ones gushing about American goalkeeper Tim Howard as the Dodgers played the Mariners -- will pay scant attention to the world's most popular game until next year's World Cup.
But fans of futbol, have no fear. Your game is going to be just fine on these shores. All the frenzied speculation over whether this latest run will finally vault soccer to big league status? Wasted frenzy.
Big league, I mean consistently big league in performance, hoopla and status? It's not going to happen. Not for a while. And that's absolutely OK. For one thing, at the grass-roots level of youth play, boosted and shaped by Latino immigration, the game continues its steady march.
While this has yet to translate into mammoth increases in TV ratings and gate receipts, or into deep and palpable sizzle, it's a groundswell that eventually will pervade.
The world is a different place than it was even four years back: flat and connected and biting at the status quo. Just as it blindsided political observers in the presidential election, grass-roots momentum will eventually have a big effect on what sports we love and why we love them.
There's more. To pit soccer against football, baseball and basketball is to lack perspective, to starve ourselves of nuance. Does a sport absolutely have to launch itself into the realm of the big three to be a success? Why? Who says? And what are we missing by thinking it does?
For years golf plugged along contentedly in the shadow of the "major" sports. There was little gnashing of teeth. Golf was still considered great. Then came one transcendent player and the game became transcendent in our minds. Change happens slowly. Then a Tiger Woods arrives, and change happens fast.
"The NBA doesn't shut down because it does not have the same TV ratings as the NFL does, the NHL isn't terrible because it does not draw as much as the NBA," said Sunil Gulati, the president of U.S. Soccer, speaking by phone from South Africa on Monday. "Is it around the corner or even a goal for us to surpass the NFL or the other major American sports? No, it isn't. But soccer shouldn't have an inferiority complex because we aren't those sports."
