Whenever an international soccer tournament starts up and some big team with lots of great players loses or draws or wins by only a goal, my mind immediately goes back to 2018.
France's men's team were a game away from winning the World Cup for the first time in 20 years. They'd comfortably beaten Argentina, Uruguay and Belgium in the first three knockout rounds. Teenage Kylian Mbappe was capturing the world's attention for the first time. Paul Pogba and N'Golo Kante were the perfect midfield duo.
They were heavy favorites to beat Croatia -- and a ton of people in France were still completely miserable.
For the Wall Street Journal, Stacy Meichtry and Joshua Robinson wrote a piece: "France, on the Brink of a World Cup Win, Has the Bleus." The sub-headline: "Fans are disappointed by the team's non-French, workmanlike approach; 'We had to be pragmatic.'" In the piece, they quote a nurse who had called into a local radio station before the final and summed up a large chunk of the nation's frustration with the way the team had been managed, "[Didier] Deschamps has a Ferrari in his hands and never breaks the speed limit!"
France, then, won the World Cup and scored four goals in the final.
The natural state of being for an international soccer fan is misery. You fall into one of two camps: You root for a team whose players aren't good enough, but you convince yourself that the players are only not good enough because the manager isn't selecting the right players. Or, you root for a team whose players are good enough but whose potential is severely limited by the structure of international soccer -- short tournaments prone to randomness, limited practice time that makes it incredibly difficult to play a free-flowing attacking style -- but you convince yourself that the team isn't achieving both your aesthetic and results-based goals because the manager isn't selecting the right players.
All of which is to say: Do not panic. Take a deep breath. The United States women's national team is going to be fine.