An American story

 The U.S. men's soccer team put on another fine show yesterday in the World Cup, smothering Australia 2-0 and winning its group after Panama clipped Turkey 1-0 later in the day.

Know what that makes our guys?

It makes them the first USMNT in history ever to clinch a spot in the knockout rounds with a group match still to play.

It also makes them about as American as America gets, for anyone who might have forgotten what America is and always should be.

This iscbecause the player who headed in the Americans' second goal in the waning minutes of the first was a 21-year-old named Alex Freeman, and you may have heard of his dad. His name is Antonio Freeman, and he has a Super Bowl ring. Won it as a stickout wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers in 1996, with whom he spent most of a career in which he caught 477 passes for 7,251 yards and 61 touchdowns.

His best season came two years later, when he was Brett Favre's go-to guy, snagging 84 balls for a league-leading 1,424 yards and 14 sixes.

In other words, his kid gets his athleticism honest.

He's fast, he's got quicks, he has a gymnast's ability to control his body in the air: Sound familiar?

So here, on America's team, you've got a young man who grew up around American football but took its DNA to the soccer pitch. And another young man (Weston McKennie) who was an Air Force brat who started playing soccer in Kaiserslautem, Germany, while his dad was stationed at Ramstein Air Force base. And yet another young man (Folarin Balogun) who grew up in London the son of Nigerian parents, but who chose to play for the U.S. because he happened to be born in Brooklyn.

Balogun scored two goals in the USMNT's 4-1 win over Paraguay in its World Cup opener. Which, as a friend of the Blob pointed out, is the best argument for birthright citizenship in a nation whose leaders want to get rid of this very American fundamental right.

On this American team, there are players who hail from 11 states, everywhere from Massachusetts to Texas and California to Delaware. There are players whose hometowns are London, Nuremberg and Almere-Stad in the Netherlands. It is, in other words, as remarkably polygot a team as America itself.

Sometimes, especially in these fractured days, we forget that. We forget that America is and always has been a patchwork of cultures, belief systems and backgrounds whose best self is our common striving -- and whose worst self is embodied by those who use fear and loathing to divide us into two camps: Americans, and some treacherous Other. 

Well, guess what, boys and girls?

In this country, we are all Others.  It's the American story right down to the ground.

As a certain soccer team keeps reminding us these days.