In the fall of 1985 I played a college soccer game in front of eleven parents and a dog. I know it was eleven because we counted at halftime, and I know about the dog because it ran onto the field in the second half and our goalkeeper had to carry it off. That was a good crowd for us. Some games it was just the dog.

On July 10 of this year, 90,185 people filled the Rose Bowl to watch women play soccer. It's the biggest crowd that has ever come to see women play any sport, anywhere. I watched it on television in my living room in Virginia Beach with sixteen eleven- and twelve-year-old girls on the floor in front of me, and when it was over I went into the kitchen and cried into a dish towel so they wouldn't see. They saw. They didn't care. Half of them were crying too.

I'm Dorothy McAtee. I'm 34, I coach my daughter Kylie's under-12 travel team, the Kestrels, and I have been waiting my whole life for this summer without knowing it. This page is my thank-you note.

The tournament ran from June 19 to July 10, with sixteen countries playing all over the United States. The opening game was ours, against Denmark at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, and almost 79,000 people came. I remember thinking that number had to be wrong. It wasn't. That was the first sign.

We beat Denmark 3-0, Nigeria 7-1 in Chicago, and North Korea 3-0 near Boston. Easy, you'd think. Then came the hard part.

The quarterfinal: Germany, July 1. This one was in Landover, Maryland, about four hours up the road from us, and Glenn and I took Kylie and two of her teammates out of school, well, out of summer camp, and drove up for it. I'm glad we did, and I nearly had a heart attack. Five minutes in, Brandi Chastain passed the ball back toward our goalkeeper and it went in our own net. Germany 1, USA 0. Kylie looked at me like the world had ended. Tiffeny Milbrett tied it up. Germany scored again right before halftime. And then, after the break, Brandi Chastain went up the other end and scored for us, and I've never seen a player look so happy to fix her own mistake. Then Joy Fawcett headed in a corner kick and we won, 3-2. I tell my girls about that game every time one of them makes a mistake on the field. You don't get to quit. You go up the other end.

The semifinal: Brazil, July 4. Out at Stanford, on the Fourth of July, which felt right. Cindy Parlow headed one in early, and Michelle Akers put away a penalty kick late, and in between Briana Scurry stopped everything Brazil had. 2-0. We watched it at my sister-in-law's cookout with a hamburger in one hand and the other hand over my eyes.

China was the best team we'd seen all summer. They'd run through the whole tournament, and everybody knew it would be close. The Kestrels came over at noon in their jerseys, sixteen girls, and Glenn made hot dogs, and we pushed the couch back against the wall so they could all sit on the floor.

It was hot in Pasadena and you could see it on the players. Ninety minutes, nothing. Michelle Akers had thrown herself at every ball all afternoon and got hurt near the end and didn't come back out. Then extra time, and still nothing, and about ten minutes into it China got a corner and a header went right past Briana Scurry toward the goal and Kristine Lilly was standing on the line and headed it out. My whole living room screamed. Kylie says I knocked over a lemonade. I don't remember that, but there was a stain.

Zero to zero after 120 minutes. Penalty kicks. Five each.

Briana Scurry's save on China's third kick is the one the girls act out in my backyard, over and over, with Kylie diving onto the grass. Then it came down to Brandi Chastain, the same Brandi who'd scored in her own net against Germany, and she put it away with her left foot, and it was over. USA 5, China 4 on penalties. World champions.

You've seen the picture of her afterward, on her knees with her shirt in her fist. It was on every magazine in the checkout line. My girls don't care what anybody said about it. To them it's a picture of a woman who just won the World Cup, which is what it is.

The President was there. Ninety thousand people were there. And in my living room sixteen girls jumped up and down so hard my pictures came off the wall, and I don't think a single one of them will ever believe that girls' soccer is something nobody watches. That's the whole thing. That's what this summer did.

The Players: notes on the women I'd want my girls to grow up like, and the coach who got them there.
My Girls, and Title IX: what this summer means to a team of twelve-year-olds, and to a woman who played for the dog.

And for the parents on our sideline: please read Youth Soccer Referee's Corner, where Linda Dumais, a youth referee, explains offside once and for all and lists the things parents shout that are wrong. Read that part twice. You know who you are.