PARIS — When the final whistle came, mercifully, Crystal Dunn collapsed forward onto her knees and pounded her fists into the grass. The bench emptied onto the field, the stadium — fans long eager, and waiting, for a fifth Olympic gold medal — erupted. But in that moment, Dunn was alone and thinking of her own journey to this point.
“You think about all the sacrifices you made,” she said. “Yeah, this game is hard but it’s not just this game. It’s everything you went through. It’s the whole tournament, the buildup.”
For Dunn, it’s not just the buildup of the last year after this program went through a historically disastrous early departure from the 2023 World Cup. It’s not just the last three months, when new head coach Emma Hayes was finally installed at the helm of the U.S. women’s national team program. For Dunn, the player who has the longest history with the senior national team, it’s everything she has gone through since 2013. The rosters she made, the rosters she didn’t. The tournaments they won, and more often, the tournaments they didn’t. The highs and lows. The injuries. The comebacks. All of it.
And on Saturday evening in Parc des Princes — sacrifices and buildup behind her, a 1-0 win against Brazil on the scoreboard, 106 minutes…
