Vindication

The final rebuttal came in the 61st minute, when the woman  with the lavender hair stared down yet another crucible moment and made it blink. Megan Rapinoe's sixth and last goal of this women's World Cup was no less a statement than any of the other five, and yet it was. Because it was the last word in a World Cup of words, most of them brave and none of them subservient.

This fourth World Cup for the U.S. women was different in the way they're all different, in that this one was the final incarnation of the legacy begun 20 years ago in Los Angeles. When Brandi Chastain punched that final PK past the Chinese goalie, stripped off her jersey and knelt screaming for joy in the sun and that now-iconic black sports bra, it sent an unmistakable message to all those Mia/Brandi/Julie Foudy/Michelle Akers-worshipping girls.

Be bold. Be unconventional. Carve your own path and hang the consequences, because the consequences will never equal the rewards.

Twenty years later we have Rapinoe and a bunch of fierce women who have indeed carved their own path and let the consequences ride, and there have been some. They have been criticized for celebrating too raucously and displaying too much arrogance, even if it's exactly the sort of arrogance we admire in male champions. And Rapinoe has been slammed by the super-patriots for disrespecting the flag and the country and, I don't know, maybe apple pie, too, for doing something 90 percent of those criticizing her do -- i.e., not singing along with the suddenly hallowed National Anthem.

Seriously, try it sometime. Go to a sporting event and note how many people actually do sing who along with anthem. It ain't many, and they tend to mumble. It's what you do when you're not sure about the words.

Yet Rapinoe, because of who she is and what she so openly espouses, catches all manner of flak for not being "American." This includes flak from Our Only Available President -- whose own understanding of what it means to be an American, and whose understanding of his nation's history, is deeply flawed at best. If not entirely incoherent.

Rapinoe's response is that she is, in fact, uniquely American, and she is as right as ham on rye. She says what she thinks. She speaks truth to power. She says bleep, no, she's not goin' to the White House if the U.S. women win, because doing so would be serving as a political prop for a charlatan who opposes everything she is.

What could possibly be more American, more up-yours-King-George, than that?

And don't expect many of her teammates to go there, either. Why would they? Advancing the cause of an incorrigible misogynist (and probably worse)? Sharing a little grip-and-grin with a man who's hung out with, and perhaps shared the proclivities of, sexual deviants and general human scum like Jeff Epstein?

No wonder Rapinoe's teammate, Ali Krieger, says she refuses to respect OOAP. Because what exactly has he done to earn the respect of these progeny of Brandi Chastain and Co.?

And what have they done, for the fourth time, to earn anything but ours?