The beauty of soccer is that the underdog has a chance, that shots can hit the crossbar, that a ball can take a deflection and go in the net, that referees can blow calls.
The beauty of the World Cup is that the first round is a mere three games and after that it's single elimination _ not a 162-game regular season or a best-of-seven series that expand the sample size and skew the probabilities toward the superior team by fostering an inevitable regression to the statistical mean.
It is also the illusion of soccer, the illusion of the World Cup.
It can tease you, it can fool you, it can make you think you're better than you really are.
And it did in the United States in the summer of 2002, creating a false sense of accomplishment and entitlement that still pervades the sport's national governing body even Friday, three days after the greatest of its many humiliations.
U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati tossed the body of national coach Bruce Arena at the feet of the angry mob in the wake of the 2018 World Cup qualification fiasco, then effectively galloped away on his high horse. In a 40-minute media teleconference that amounted to campaign speech, he refused to resign and sheepishly admitted he has asked federation members to nominate him for a fourth four-year term in February's election.
Gulati, an economics professor at Columbia, has always fancied himself as the smartest guy in the room and let you know it. Arena has, too, and he issued a resignation statement Friday morning in which he insists: "While this is a difficult time, I maintain a fierce belief that we are heading in the right direction."
In the same paragraph, he mentions the "the high of reaching the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup."
And there it is, 2002. Maybe not the bane of U.S. Soccer's existence, but certainly the root of its arrogance.
Americans love to play the what-if game about the World Cup co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, about the hand ball in the 50th minute of their quarterfinal against Germany that Scottish referee Hugh Dallas didn't call but other top officials later conceded he should have. Germany led 1-0 when U.S. defender Gregg Berhalter redirected a corner kick past German goalkeeper Oliver Kahn, only for defender Torsten Frings to conveniently leave his left arm outstretched and prevent the ball from crossing the goal line.
What if it's a penalty kick and red card? What if it's 1-1 and the Americans have a man advantage for the final 40 minutes of regulation or another 30 of overtime? What if they reach the semifinals, where they would have faced a South Korea team that three weeks earlier had never won a World Cup game?
It's a fair question. But here's perhaps an even fairer one:
What if they never made it out of the first round in 2002?
Which, if not for one serendipitous piece of fortune after another, they wouldn't have.
The Yanks shocked Portugal 3-2 in the opener ... after a cross by Landon Donovan hit the back shoulder of a Portuguese defender and caromed 20 yards into the goal. They tied their second game 1-1 against South Korea ... after goalkeeper Brad Friedel saved a penalty kick, statistically a one-in-five chance. They got drilled 3-1 in their third group game by a Poland team already eliminated ... and advanced only when South Korea beat Portugal 1-0 in the other group finale.
Portugal got two red cards and had a shot hit the post late. Some media reported Guus Hiddink, South Korea's Dutch coach, was content with a 0-0 tie, which would have been enough for both South Korea and Portugal to advance _ and which would have eliminated the nation with a huge military presence on its borders that many Koreans privately resent.
But Park Ji-sung, no doubt wanting revenge for the red-card tackle against him, scored in the 70th minute and South Korea won 1-0. The Yanks not only were through but got regional rival Mexico, a team they regularly beat, in the round of 16.
It would become a seminal moment in American soccer, a galvanizing opportunity to build interest among heretofore apathetic fans, a glorious chance to dream a little. And all that was invaluable in the arc of the sport's growth here.
It also distorted reality, luck mistaken for ascension. I have covered all 23 U.S. World Cup games over the past quarter-century, and for me there was a palpable shift in attitude that night in Ulsan, South Korea _ the beginning of a haughty superiority complex that, 15 years later, ultimately felled Arena's side on a water-logged field in the Caribbean tropics.
Germany re-examined its entire soccer system after reaching the quarterfinals in the 1998 World Cup. It introduced even more radical changes following 2002 despite reaching the final because, well, what if that Frings hand ball had been whistled?
The Americans, meanwhile, plowed forward with the status quo. Four years earlier, U.S. Soccer had unveiled Project 2010 _ a grandiose $50 million initiative with the unabashed mission of winning a World Cup. It had goals for each ensuing tournament leading to the 2010 title, and the target for 2002 was the quarterfinals. Right on schedule.
But what if they hadn't survived the first round? What if they slinked home with a second straight first-round exit following the last-place finish in 1998?
Would Arena have been retained as national coach? Would the federation have abandoned the notion that an American coach was best for the national program given the debacle of 1998 with Steve Sampson? Would it have realized then that the youth development system was horribly flawed and embarked on the massive overhaul that people are clamoring for now?
Instead, Arena took the team to Germany in 2006 and didn't get out of the first round. Gulati, now federation president, fired him and hired his former assistant, Bob Bradley, instead of a foreigner. Bradley reached the second round in 2010 after getting a gift goal from England, tying a nation with 1.3 million fewer people than San Diego County (Slovenia) and needing a last-second score against another nation (Algeria) with little World Cup pedigree.
When Gulati fired Jurgen Klinsmann last November, he reverted to the man whose World Cup record (2-4-2) is more of a soccer formation than a badge of achievement.
After the Yanks beat Panama 4-0 in the penultimate qualifier last week in Orlando, Fla., Gulati bounced onto the field and snapped pictures of the celebration with his cell phone. Four days later, he was slumped in a chair at a dour press conference in Couva, Trinidad, holding a plastic water bottle.
By Friday, he was declaring it half-full instead of half-empty on a teleconference with the nation's (incredulous) soccer media. The aloof, condescending air of World Cup quarterfinalists had returned.
Gulati admitted "I take full responsibility" but apparently not enough to resign. He insisted he hasn't decided whether to run for a fourth term as president but spent most of the 40-minute call talking about how "we" will fix this. He outlined plans to hire an interim national coach and, yes, a permanent one perhaps before the February elections.
He said: "If I look at the totality of where we've come from, and where the game is generally now, with our professional leagues, with player development, with our economic resources, all of those things _ those things didn't happen overnight. And they didn't happen on their own."
He was calm, articulate and smug.
He was the smartest man in the room again.
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