Solo by Hope Solo (best free ereader .TXT) 📕

coaches were flooding onto the field, leaping with joy. The players on the field all ran to envelop Ali.

All but one. Abby veered to her right, sprinting straight toward me. I ran to her and leaped into her arms screaming with joy, and we fell to the ground. Together.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Silver Lining

Forty-seven thousand fans in Yankee Stadium roared at the big screen as we went to penalty kicks against Brazil. Flights in Denver were delayed until the game ended. Everyone back home, it seemed, had stopped whatever they were doing to watch our game as Sunday morning stretched into Sunday afternoon. Even if they didn’t start out watching it, as the game progressed, someone called or tweeted or posted on Facebook about this amazing soccer game, and more and more people tuned in to see what it was all about. And they were captivated.

“I love these women!” tweeted Tom Hanks.

LeBron James offered, “Congrats, ladies!”

“Amazing game,” Aaron Rodgers tweeted. “Now let’s get the cup, ladies!”

I was named the player of the match. That night Abby and I took a car service to the ESPN set in downtown Dresden. “When did you score your goal?” I asked her in the back of the car, while I checked the messages and texts flooding my phone.

“I think in the 120th minute,” Abby said.

No, Aaron Heifetz said, it was later than that. It was the latest goal ever scored in the World Cup. The 122nd minute. “Oh my God,” we both said.

“I don’t get how that just happened,” Abby said of the match. “I just kept saying ‘One chance.’ That’s all we need.”

On the ESPN set, we finally had a chance to see the highlights, every crazy thing that happened in the game. We couldn’t believe the roller coaster we had just been on. “Everything was against us,” I told host Bob Ley. “This team has something special. We found a way to win.”

It was inevitable that 2007 would come up. How, Ley asked, did we put the divisions behind us? Perhaps, he wondered, there were even tensions between the two of us? We both just smiled. “Pia came in and changed the dynamics of the team,” I said. “And to be honest, we grew up. We threw our differences out the window and learned to respect one another off and on the field.”

Abby said, “I’d rather have no other person in goal behind me; this woman saves sure goals. Hope’s the best goalkeeper in the world. I’d rather have no one else behind me.”

AFTER WE LEFT the set, we went to a late dinner with our family and friends, buzzing with excitement. We watched the replays—amazed at Rapinoe’s laser-like cross finding Abby’s head. We jeered the referee and her double penalty kick.

Late that night, Adrian and I wandered the cobblestone streets of Dresden in the rain. The city glistened. It was the perfect place to celebrate all that Adrian and I had gone through together, and what the team had accomplished. Adrian kept reminding me to enjoy the night—my instinct was to leap forward to the semifinal game, but Adrian wouldn’t let me. He told me how much emotion there was in the stands—the fans praying, how he had prayed to his father, held his dad’s necklace, asking him to “let Hope have her moment.”

“That was one of the greatest sporting events in history,” he said, intense and almost in tears. “Don’t ever forget that.”

The next morning, my teammates and I ate breakfast silently. We knew it was time to turn the page. We had to play France in the semifinal in just two days. But when I made eye contact with Megan Rapinoe, she started laughing and I said, “That was crazy, huh?”

It was crazy. Abby and I were on Good Morning America the next day. Some American journalists who hadn’t been in Germany flew in to write stories about the most talked about sports team on the planet. Everyone was calling the Brazil game the greatest moment for women’s soccer since the 1999 World Cup, and the overnight television ratings were the best since that epic tournament. The comparisons were inevitable, I guess—a thrilling game that ended in penalty kicks, capturing the attention of the country—and having so many of the ’99ers in Germany working for ESPN made the connection easy. But we were all weary of the comparisons. “That’s all we’ve ever heard about,” I told reporters. “And we all know that they paved the way. But at some point in time you have to let go and build new stories and new names to the game. I think if there’s any team to do it, it’s this team. . . . We’re not here to win because they did it twelve years ago. We’re here to win for our country, for our team, for all the work we’ve put in. So all this stuff about ’99—their journey was great—but that was twelve years ago.” Though forces kept trying to pull us back, we finally stepped out of the shadow of the past.

II.

Our semifinal game against France was my hundredth cap: one hundred games for the national team since that first one in the spring of 2000, when I played against Iceland as an eighteen-year-old college freshman. Now I was two weeks away from my thirtieth birthday, my shoulder full of scar tissue and metal and pain. I was now a veteran.

Customarily, a player’s hundredth cap is a big deal, something to be saluted with a ceremony, but I asked the staff not to even mention it: this game didn’t need any personal tributes; it was a World Cup semifinal. We needed to focus completely on France, one of the surprise teams of the tournament. France was coming into the game on an extra day of rest—while we had played an extra hour against Brazil. Our legs were shot. We spent the little time we had in Mönchengladbach trying to rejuvenate our legs and study France, a team