What happened on Monday?

Since somewhere around the 57th minute Monday evening, give or take the exact moment when Matt Freese kicked the grass instead of the ball and then Tim Ream flailed in the air behind him while the ball passed him into the net, I have been wandering about the house like the young bird in the children’s classic, “Are you my mother?”, and asking various objects for a response to Pochettino’s summer-long mantra, “Why not us?”

“Why not us?”, I’ve wondered to the oven, a chair, the other chair, the couch, the ceiling, and repeatedly, my sister’s dog Olive, who responds by dropping me a ball.

You’ll have to forgive my delayed response to the USMNT’s 4-1 defeat to Belgium; I’ve been hard at work asking all objects in near proximity, alive or inanimate, for an explanation as to how eleven players having a strong tournament suddenly, collectively, have the worst game of their lives when it matters most.

And they adjusted. The Red Devils had a flat-footed group stage (drawing Egypt and Iran before beating New Zealand), which turned into a Round of 32 game against Senegal that looked, for about 75 minutes, like they were going home and deserved it. Suddenly, with substitutions that influenced their starting lineup against the United States (Lukebakio, Raskin, Onana, Ngoy in; KDB, Doku, Vanaken, Theate out) they turned a corner and looked like a different team. Ah, I’d thought to myself watching, just in time.

While riding a groundswell of galvanizing performances, many hoped that a 5-2 loss in Atlanta this March was long buried, irrelevant to Monday. Well— not quite. True: Tyler Adams was missing, Chris Richards was missing. We started Matt Turner instead of Matt Freese. We were in a different formation. They were trying things out, and so were we.

But Balogun, the champion of our attack, played in that March game. So did Tim Ream; he was a step slow and they seem to have remembered, then built a plan around getting him isolated despite our change in formation. In that March half which featured six of 11 World Cup starters (Balogun, Pulisic, Tillman, McKennie, Ream, Jedi) we finished the first forty-five 1-1. But we were down 3-1 by the 64th minute when subs beyond Roldan came in, and down 4-1 with Pulisic, McKennie and Tillman still on the field. A noticeable gap in quality didn’t disappear simply because three months did.

For months now, like many, I’ve imbibed the pervasive summer mantras emanating from camp: “Why not us?”, “Never Chase Reality”, and, most recently, Pochettino’s evocative declaration that he wants to “touch the moon”:

“The objective is to touch the moon. I want to touch the moon. I don’t want to say, ‘oh I want to be close to the moon’. No, close to the moon, no. I want to touch the moon. And that is our objective, is to be there, over the moon.”

Studious sports watcher that I am, when Pochettino said the so-called Miracle on Ice (when the United States beat the Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympics) was the model, I consulted Hollywood’s (ever-accurate and academic) depiction for advice. They had a good goalie. Jim Craig saved 36 of 39 shots in a 4-3 underdog victory. Earlier this year, when the United States beat Canada to claim another gold, the pattern repeated. Connor Hellebuyck saved 41 of 42 shots in a 2-1 win.

Matt Freese is a good goalkeeper, but he is not yet elite. As I’ve argued for many posts now, making good on the mantras was going to require that Freese unfurl unforeseen heroics—- a Vozinha level performance, if you will. But the 27-year-old NYCFC keeper is still working toward his full potential, and has just 19 national team appearances to his name (why he did not play against Türkiye will never make sense, he could have used the experience).

Were the line of defenders in front of Freese able to completely shield him from that task, the need for Hellebuyck-level heroics would diminish, but not disappear. Ream, Richards & co. had masterful early performances, but they were under far less pressure. Against the first elite team they were befuddled, especially in the first half.

Miracle was the mission, but this team didn’t have the defense or goalkeeper to pull that off.

That said, this Belgian side is the most beatable Belgium we’ve seen. And a different generation of USMNT players nearly beat them when they were at their height (again, though, see point about goalkeepers. Tim Howard’s 16 saves to nearly beat them in Brazil remain the all-time World Cup record). Belgium’s quality and adjustments secured Monday’s result. But something else went awry, too.

By the time the whistle blew with 42 million people watching from the U.S. across Fox, Telemundo and Peacock (the most-watched soccer telecast in American history), we’d lived through a wild 24 hours that began with the unexpected news that Folarin Balogun would be eligible to play.

Over the course of the ensuing day, Trump (“Are you asking me about the soccer?”) told reporters he called Infantino personally, Belgium attempted to reverse the reversal, America’s ability to rage bait the planet proved in-conquerable once more and Marco Rubio, on his way to Türkiye, half-jokingly offered to bring it up at the NATO Summit this week.

Whether all of that is specifically what threw off the team’s mentality in our moon-touching moment is conjecture. What is clear is that the mentality was askew. So askew, so thoroughly thrown off, that for the first 10 minutes or so I felt like I was watching myself in one of those dreams (surely, I am not the only one who has them) where you are trying to play a game of soccer or basketball or tennis but you are stuck in the ground and your limbs don’t work.

They were shook. Stunned. By the end, barely fighting. Was it the spotlight? The pressure of a host nation, which had yet to thwart them? The precipice of a quarter-final? The red card with a suspended suspension? Personally, I think it was the last.

The intervention to right a perceived wrong was seen by many (certainly by the Belgians) as a thumb on the scale, and it backfired. But crumbling before that backlash, or suddenly feeling yourself unworthy and unsure as some have suggested, is a fault in the team’s fabric as foreboding as not having the center backs or goalkeeper to pull the ‘Miracle’ off. A collective of humans so easily thrown by outside influence is going to lose, eventually.

I am, within reason, a fan of taunting. When Lukaku scored the fourth goal to make it 4-1 and then celebrated with a montage of crowd-riling celebrations culminating in the Trump dance, I want you to know that I laughed and enjoyed it. But they are not good at the dance, which they did repeatedly, including in the dressing room after. Why do their hips not work? They need to lean forward a bit, or look less like marionettes.