LOS ANGELES — At the end, as the United States was running out of time, running out of World Cup, you could open a window anywhere in the country and hear the pleadings of a nascent soccer nation. Hadn’t the Americans surprised all of us before? Hadn’t they had that miracle comeback against Slovenia, that miracle escape against Algeria?
Wasn’t there time for one more piece of wonder?
Inside a crowded saloon in Southern California, a man who had painted his face red, white and blue started to mutter a Hail Mary under his breath, in between sips of his Stella Artois. The seconds melted away. The men from Ghana, clad in their red uniforms, the last representative from the host continent of Africa, began to play four corners with the soccer ball.
PHOTOS: GHANA BOUNCES U.S., 2-1
On the television, the announcers sounded grave.
“It’s all but over,” they said sadly.
And then it was. There was a whistle that blared across Royal Bafokeng Stadium, and it might as well have been a gigantic leg that kicked plugs out of walls all across the country, a gigantic pin popping balloons in dens and saloons and public squares from Manhattan to Kansas City to Seattle to Galveston.
“Stinging,” is how Bob Bradley, the U.S. coach, described it. “After the way we played in the first round, I thought we’d gotten to a point where we were ready to go deep in this tournament. We knew Ghana was a good team but …”
He paused for a half a heartbeat. The truth already was hurting.
“But we didn’t get the job done.”
Soccer has fought so many perennial battles in this country, scratching for a lasting place in the national culture. And yet, after all the jokes about nil-nil games on one side of the conversation, and all the strident campaigning to enlighten the beautiful aspects of the beautiful game on the other, it seemed at last this was a team that had captured something real, something visceral in the American spirit. Not everyone was sold. But a lot were.
There was the goal that slipped past the England goalie in the tournament’s first game, a signal perhaps that this team was playing with pixie dust on its cleats. There was the remarkable return from 0-2 down against Slovenia, and the winning goal stolen away that seemed to unify even non-soccer-partisans in the most basic of all sporting emotions: rage at a referee.
And then, of course, there was the goal Landon Donovan scored in the 91st minute Wednesday, the beauty that won the U.S. their group and sent them into the most favorable kind of bracket in the knockout round. Ghana is the 32nd-ranked nation in the FIFA listings, 18 places behind Team USA. A win would bring Uruguay, at No. 18. The U.S. wouldn’t exactly have to topple Argentina and Brazil on their way to the Final Four.
And then, in a flash, it was gone. It was over. The U.S. had allowed their customary goal early in the first half, had fought back for their customary second-half equalizer on a Donovan penalty kick. The way the latter stages played out it seemed almost certain there would be a stalemate across extra time, setting up an historic shootout that surely would incite debate about how such matches should end.
Except suddenly, shockingly, three minutes into overtime, Ghana’s Andre Ayew booted the ball ahead to his team’s best player, Asamoah Gyan. Gyan was confronted by two Americans, Carlos Bocanegra and Jay DeMerit, but Gyan had an angle, had a shot, took it, and you could feel the blood rush out of the Americans’ faces.
And that was it. The U.S. tried to push. At one point, on a late corner kick, Tim Howard, the goalkeeper, wandered into the offensive scrum doing what everyone watching wanted to do: lend a hand somehow, someway. Keep the World Cup alive. Buy another few days of this tournament.
Instead, there was that final whistle that filled the encroaching night of Rustenburg, that sent Bill Clinton and Mick Jagger home with heavy hearts, that forces us now to ponder other matters on the home sporting front, LeBron and baseball and “Hard Knocks” and the like. The U.S. led in this tournament for only 206 seconds, yet it seemed soccer won a lot more than that.
Did it? Only the next four years will tell us for sure.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com