US goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher stood alone holding the ball and inhaled deeply, her eyes wide in disbelief, as Sweden’s players raced pitchside to form a joyous heap of yellow on the grass. Some of her teammates were in tears. “Feels like a bad dream,” Alex Morgan would later tell Fox Sports.
The match was over, the US defeated by Sweden on penalties in the last 16, and gone were the dreams of making history. The team that had cleared the path for all others had been caught. This was a changing of the guard in women’s soccer.
It isn’t that the US has never lost a women’s soccer match, but it last suffered defeat at a World Cup 12 years ago and has never been knocked out of the tournament at such an early stage.
This is a country that had won four of the previous eight editions of the tournament and had…