Monday night, Belgium beat us 4-1 in Seattle.
The pile-on started before the final whistle, and it has not let up since.
I am not joining it. I have never been more bullish on this team, or on where this game is headed in this country.
Let me tell you where we started, because it matters. I was a kid in 1990, piled onto somebody's couch, watching the U.S. get run off the field 5-1. Nobody in the room cared. Nobody in the country cared. We did not even have a pro league yet.
Now look at us. Thirty MLS clubs. NFL stadiums sold out for a month. The most attended World Cup in history. The best player on the planet spent the back half of his career playing right here.
That is not decline. That is a country falling in love with a game. Dan Sullivan would call that the Gain. Measure backward from where you started, and Monday looks very different.
So I can hold both things. Bullish on the long game. And honest about Monday.
Because something happened to this team on Monday that I cannot stop thinking about. And it is the whole reason I do the work I do.
The psyche changed.
Belgium had been average all tournament. Then they walked into Seattle and played free. We played scared. The same players who beat Bosnia a man down. The same guys who sang Country Roads with the whole stadium a week ago. This time, tentative. Heavy. A step slow in the mind before they were ever a step slow on the field.
Here is the question I get paid to sit with, in my work on performance and culture. Did we lose our edge before we ever kicked off?
The red card. The reversal. The noise of the whole week. Belgium got galvanized by it. Our guys carried the weight of it.
I cannot prove it. Nobody can. But everything I have learned about human performance points the same way.
The edge is fragile.
It is not a trophy you win once and keep on a shelf. It is a state. It shows up when you play free, and it slips the moment fear gets a hand on the wheel. It drifts toward the team playing loose, and away from the team playing tight. It can leave the building before the whistle ever blows.
This is the part that is not about soccer.
You have an edge too. That version of you that is loose, clear, present, unafraid. The one who leads from belief instead of from the fear of losing. And it is every bit as fragile as theirs. The noise gets to you. The doubt creeps in. The weight of the moment makes you tentative, and you play the biggest games of your life a step slow in your own head.
Which is exactly why you cannot leave it to chance.
Keeping your edge is not something that happens to you on a good day. It is something you protect on purpose. That is the whole reason we talk about living and leading with intention. Intention is how you guard the state that does your best work, so it is still there when the room is loud and the stakes are real.
So here is your one thing for the week.
Name what actually protects your edge. The morning walk. The people you let close. The five quiet minutes before the room fills up. The story you tell yourself before kickoff. Then defend those things this week like the season depends on them. Because yours does.
A bad night does not define you. What you do the morning after does. These players will go do the quiet, unglamorous work, and they will come back better. I would bet on it. Do the same with yours.
I am still a die-hard fan. Still bullish. And somewhere out there, a nine-year-old just decided this game is hers.
See you next Saturday.