Column: Megan Rapinoe ends her U.S. soccer career in Chicago, leaving a legacy of hope and joy

There is no clever way to kick off a farewell to Megan Rapinoe.

Over the 17 years of her international career, we’ve run out of platitudes. It makes it difficult to know where to begin.

Perhaps lead off with the obvious. There never will be another quite like her. Please forgive the cliché — it’s trite but also true. Follow with her accolades, the Olympic gold and bronze medals, the pair of World Cup trophies, the Ballon d’Or. Make a turn to her activism, the lifetime of advocating for the LGBTQ+ community, the leadership in a yearslong struggle for equal pay, the solidarity with campaigns against racism and transphobia.

Maybe we can settle on this as a place to start: despised or adored, a hero or a villain, it really doesn’t matter. However you feel about Rapinoe, she could not be denied. And when she makes her grand exit from soccer at Soldier Field on Sunday, Rapinoe will walk away from the game knowing that she has indelibly, irrevocably changed the team, the country and the sport she loved — for the better.

It’s fitting in its own way that Rapinoe’s long, winding journey will come to an end Sunday in Chicago. Long before the Olympic gold and the World Cup trophies, Rapinoe could be found in the early days of her career on the grass of Toyota Park — now SeatGeek Stadium — on a Chicago Red Stars roster that included fellow U.S. star Carli Lloyd.

Rapinoe had yet to dye her hair to its signature white-blonde when the Red Stars drafted her with the No. 2 pick in the Women’s Professional Soccer league in 2009. But she was still hard to miss, scoring three goals and earning an All-Star nod in 38 appearances during her first two years as a professional.

Eventually, Rapinoe would become the face of soccer for club and country in the U.S., but she wasn’t set to make that journey in Chicago. The original Red Stars ceased operations in 2010, and the WPS folded a year later, scattering Rapinoe and the bulk of her fellow American stars to teams in Europe.

By the time the National Women’s Soccer League was established in 2012, Rapinoe had become one of its best-known stars, thanks to the 2011 World Cup.

The game-saving goal of the semifinal against Brazil has since been canonized in the annals of international soccer lore. Seconds left in a hard-fought overtime with a one-goal disadvantage, Rapinoe scrambled along the left flank of the field, jerked her chin up to find Abby Wambach in the box, then launched an improbable, impossible cross from nearly 25 yards away. The crash of the ball rang impossibly loud against the back netting as the goal lifted the Americans to an overtime victory.

Longtime fans of women’s soccer can recite parts of Ian Darke’s play-by-play verbatim: “Rapinoe gets the cross in, it’s toward Wambach — Oh, can you believe this? Abby Wambach has saved the USA’s life in this World Cup!”

Rapinoe later said the pass was a Hail Mary, that she was certain the U.S. was about to lose. But this was always Rapinoe’s legacy — a player defined in equal parts by hope and audacity, willing to whip in one more cross just to see if a little magic could happen.

This was the version of her that I discovered at 14, wearing the last Rapinoe T-shirt jersey my mother could find at Dick’s Sporting Goods, planted on the carpeted living room floor because I couldn’t get close enough to the TV.

At the time, I didn’t know how much I would need this version of Rapinoe — didn’t know yet how hard it would be to grow up as a queer kid, didn’t know how quickly soccer would become a touchpoint and through line for the rest of my life. All I knew was that Rapinoe represented something I wished to find for myself.

In the years that followed, Rapinoe remained aspirational in her conviction. There is no such thing as a perfect role model. But Rapinoe was a reminder of how it looked to run toward conflict rather than away from it, even when it was messy or uncomfortable or frightening.

It’s impossible to ignore that Rapinoe became a household name through vitriol as much as anything else, a cultural lightning rod for those who hold her in disdain as well as reverence. And it’s a strange legacy, to be remembered for the way you are hated just as much as for the way you are loved.

But this is a mantle Rapinoe always has shouldered willingly, embracing the divisiveness that powered her impact. It can only be backed up by being good — scratch that, being the best — on the field. And Rapinoe did that, again and again and again.

In 2012, when she led the U.S. in assists on the way to Olympic gold. In 2015, when she anchored one of the most dominant American teams of all time in the World Cup in Canada. And especially in France in 2019.

It’s hard to explain just how good Rapinoe was in 2019. She just made it look too easy. She stepped into a spotlight she didn’t even mean to create and then commanded it, crushing goals and turning to celebrate with that I told you so grin. It’s the “call your shot” moment that many athletes seek and few ever actually obtain, a performance built to stoke both admiration and contempt.

It might feel anticlimactic, that after all this Rapinoe will close her career on a loss. This certainly was not the ending Rapinoe envisioned — a missed penalty kick striking one of the final blows of an early exit from her fourth and final World Cup.

But careers aren’t stories. They rarely finish on a high note. And when Rapinoe steps off that pitch for the last time, those who watched her and those who admired her and yes, even those who despised her, will be entrusted to determine how they wish to remember her career in the past tense.

In some of her final words to the media during a news conference Saturday, Rapinoe expressed a desire to leave a particular legacy: one of joy.

“It’s too difficult to be in the doldrums of focus all the time,” Rapinoe said. “That’s just not realistic. Particularly for this team, there’s so much pressure on it all the time. Certainly on the field, but especially for us during the last seven years, so much pressure about everything that we said, everything that we did. Whether we were kneeling or talking about equal pay or talking about trans rights, there’s so much pressure. We have the right to enjoy what we’re doing as well.”

“A lot of times my joy was absolutely an act of resistance or a big, glaring middle finger to everyone. But this is my life and this is my career and I get to do with it what I want.”

For myself, I’ll remember her the same as she was 12 years ago, the same as she has been to me ever since: lifting her chin to glance to the goal, arms stretched and smile even wider in celebration, making a name for herself built on hope. And yes, joy.