Do you remember the summer of 2014?
Of course you do. We all do. The United States men's soccer team captivates a nation of fans with grit and determination and a goalkeeper playing out of his mind. The team advances from an excruciating group stage at the World Cup. It is inches -- inches -- from upsetting Belgium in the Round of 16 and booking a quarterfinal against Lionel Messi and Argentina on Independence Day weekend.
American soccer is the talk, the buzz, the juice. American soccer is everywhere. Bars overflow during U.S. games. Web traffic spikes. Television ratings soar. Americans are transfixed.
On the ground in Brazil and all over the United States, the whole month feels like a moment. In a country where, for better or worse, soccer still gets its biggest public bounces from the national teams, this run feels like the cresting of a wave, the step or two just before the mountaintop. By the end, excitement for the next World Cup -- and the future -- is at a whipping, rolling boil.
And then ...
Well, you know how those 2018 World Cup qualifiers went.
There was the at-home loss against Mexico. The first loss against Costa Rica. The hand-wringing over whether coach Jurgen Klinsmann should be fired. Jurgen Klinsmann being fired. The -- give me strength -- second loss against Costa Rica. The faint hope that new coach Bruce Arena might be able to pull this off anyway followed by the absolute disaster in Trinidad & Tobago, a sequence that is basically like jumping over a pit of hot coals only to land squarely on a nail on the other side.
The pain was real: For the first time since 1986, there will be a World Cup without the United States.
A reckoning, then, is inevitable. And since we know that the United States won't be at the world's biggest sporting event in Russia this June, there is an obvious question: Where in the world is American soccer? Where is it going?
These are the questions poking at anyone connected to the sport in the United States now. Players, instructors, federation executives and fans are all sifting through the same rubble in search of something -- anything -- to explain it all. This is why ESPN will range widely in examining the state of American soccer this spring, through a series of stories and videos looking back at what led to this point as well as spinning forward to uncover where -- and how -- the next generation of American stars will emerge.
Potential answers run the gamut. We could look at the grassroots level of the sport and put coaching -- how American coaches are being taught as well as how accessible coaching programs are -- into the spotlight. Or we could look at youth soccer programs and how much American children practice and play, or we could dig into the chemistry of the national team, picking apart the way that veterans and younger players meshed (or didn't) during the past cycle.
Bubbling beneath it all, of course, is the evergreen: the pathways that young American soccer stars take to the highest levels of the game (or, as the case might be, don't). The development system, such as it is, serves as the vampire of soccer discussions in the United States, reliably rising during the sport's darkest passages. It is immortal.
The possibilities, as ever, remain varied and murky, with some players developing in MLS-sponsored academies, others going to college and still others going abroad. Add the occasional high-profile loss of a dual-national star-to-be, such as Jonathan Gonzalez, who chose to pursue a national team career with Mexico instead of the United States, and the entire issue remains the rough equivalent of a gasoline-soaked rag lying just beside soccer's enduring fire.
It should be said: Context is important. The United States is hardly the only country to have a surprising collapse during a World Cup qualifying attempt (the Netherlands and Italy -- Italy! -- are among the bigger names to miss out on Russia, too) so it is not as though this kind of hiccup is unprecedented. Yet Mexico -- which is a more appropriate comparison since it competes in the same qualifying tournament as the U.S. -- hasn't failed to qualify since 1982 and has failed only twice since 1950 (it was also banned from the 1990 tournament over player eligibility violations).
Even with that run of success, hysteria over the fate of the Mexican national team is routine. In the United States, this sort of turmoil -- this complete overhaul -- is unprecedented. In the aftermath of the loss in Trinidad, U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati and Arena sat in a news conference room and tried to make sense of what happened. Now, just months later, both men are gone: Gulati replaced by Carlos Cordeiro after an intense election campaign, and Arena let go without a successor in place.
No one is under the impression that these are issues that can be solved by one or two job changes, though. This is not something a shiny new coach can fix. These are institutional problems.
Will it be hard to watch the games this June and July, hard to see it all unfold in Russia without Christian Pulisic up front or Tim Howard in the net or the American Outlaws in the stands, bouncing and singing? It will. But there is little choice. This tournament is for others.
All that American soccer can do is remember the warmth of its summer in Brazil and hope for what still might be yet to come.