Hope Regained

MARCUS SOLO was still whooping at the television and holding his four-month-old son, Jonathan, last Thursday morning when the phone rang in his Cheney, Wash., home. The U.S. women's soccer team had just upset Brazil 1--0 in the Olympic gold medal match, and now the player of the game—his younger sister, Hope, the U.S. goalkeeper—was calling from the field at Workers' Stadium in Beijing. "Marcus, we did it! We just won the [bleeping] gold medal!" Solo screamed into her cellphone, which she'd hidden in a towel beside her goal. "I wasn't expecting her call, so it was pretty neat," says Marcus, who was in tears on the phone. "It really was a storybook ending."

Only 11 months earlier Hope Solo had been famously benched before a 4--0 World Cup semifinal loss to Brazil by then coach Greg Ryan, who questioned whether Solo could make reflex saves against the crafty Samba Queens. (Solo was banished from the team after criticizing Ryan and her replacement, Briana Scurry.) But in the 72nd minute of a scoreless Olympic final, Solo faced the specter of Marta, the two-time World Player of the Year, loading up from the left side of the penalty box just eight yards away. "I thought for sure it was a goal," Solo would say, recalling that Marta once scored four times on her during a club game in Sweden. "I wasn't coming out too hard, because if I bought her fake she would school me for sure." Solo waited. Marta fired near-post. And Solo lunged to parry the blast with her right forearm—a reflex save for the ages.

The U.S.'s unmatched fitness kicked in during extra time, when midfielder Carli Lloyd's looping 21-yard strike decided a game marked more by tension than virtuosity. (Brazil outplayed the U.S. for the first 65 minutes.) But that hardly means the match wasn't memorable. The unexpected gold medal capped the greatest on-field achievement in the storied history of U.S. women's soccer, given the challenges the team faced: the absence of forward Abby Wambach, its best player, who broke her right leg last month; the superior skill of Brazil; the shift from a long-ball style to a possession-based attack by first-year coach Pia Sundhage; the constant comparisons with the Mia Hamm--led juggernauts of the past; and the humbling 2--0 loss to Norway to open the Games.

The 1999 World Cup will always be the breakthrough moment for U.S. women's soccer, but the 2008 Olympics will be remembered as the tournament in which the next generation seized its own world championship in the most difficult of circumstances. "I didn't think it was going to be this fairy-tale ending," Solo said. "I made a bad decision coming off my line on the first goal in the first minute of the opening game. But I knew I needed to have a great last game in order for us to win, and it felt so good to be that impact player."

Whether Solo will join her teammates in the new Women's Professional Soccer league next spring remains to be seen; she says she might return to Sweden, where Marta and the other top Brazilians play. Yet there's little doubt that Solo, 27, will continue playing for the U.S.—and for Sundhage, the Swedish coach who has emphasized a more skillful style. Sundhage had been on a one-year contract through the Olympic year, but at a party for the team and family members after the gold medal game, U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati took the stage, dropped to one knee and proposed (a contract extension) to Sundhage that will likely run through the 2011 World Cup. "We're going to play a brilliant game in the years to come with Pia as our coach," says Solo. "New players are going to come into this team and help us keep possession more, and I think we're going to turn into a Brazil-style team."

Or at least a Brazil-style team that (unlike the two-time Olympic silver medalist) actually wins when it counts.