After painful World Cup finish, Megan Rapinoe ‘feels like it’s the right time’ to walk away

On Sunday night in Melbourne, as the seagulls of AAMI Park wheeled freely overhead, the United States lost to their old frenemy Sweden in the round of 16 at the World Cup. Despite the Swedes dominating their group while the U.S. scraped out of theirs, it began as a match of uncertainty. But everyone took to heart the lesson that this World Cup is about confounding expectations. Megan Rapinoe felt that perhaps most acutely of all. 

What happened was what you should have predicted with both sides feeling so uncertain: scoreless in regulation, scoreless in extra time, and then to penalties to decide who moves on. But the unexpected element of it finally came into play as Rapinoe stepped up to take her penalty, the fourth in line after three confident penalties from her teammate. Sweden’s Nathalie Björn had just missed, giving the U.S. an advantage. Rapinoe has, in the past, been as reliable a penalty taker as there is. In fact she had only ever missed one before, a save by Aubrey Kingsbury in NWSL play back in 2018. In this moment — a moment so familiar to Rapinoe — cradling the future of 22 teammates in her hands, she skied the ball over the goal. It was the first time she had ever missed the goal entirely with a penalty in her 23 career attempts.

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Maybe there’s a metaphor in there about the ways that careers end in this game; that sometimes you don’t get a satisfying end to the chapter. Sometimes you have to live with what you get, even if it’s sad and frustrating and a giant what-if that you just carry around, until the weight gets familiar and you can hold it without thinking about how heavy it is.

Rapinoe herself seemed to understand that the best. She smiled a wry smile in the mixed zone, red-rimmed