We were looking into the setting sun, shading our eyes with a hand so we could see better what was happening on the field. The field was plastic, geometrically painted to delight the eye, though we’d rather have looked at grass. But as if to compensate nature for the insult to it, across the field where there’d be the far stands in any more imposing venue there was only a line of trees.
But no one had actually met her. Which is why my wife, Betsy, and I got in the car and drove to Lisle. Being there felt like what I imagine it was like being at an NFL game in Canton, Ohio, in 1922, when that league was three years old, rustic, and surviving on love and prayer. We met Becky after the game alongside the rope that kept the crowd back as the players trekked from the playing field across campus to wherever it was they took their showers. She signed some posters and a jersey, and I gave her a picture of Auntie Rose’s family taken when she and her sister—my grandmother—were little girls in 1894. I thought that Becky was one of the finest people I’ve ever met. “We think we’re all pretty special too,” I said, “but we’ve never had anyone in the family before who won a World Cup.”
