I knew it was coming, yet somehow I wasn't prepared. The quadrennial explosion of commentary on soccer's place America has hit me squarely in the face frying-pan style, and I'm not handling it well. It's edging me quickly to a meltdown, something I'm desperate to avoid because I realize the the stupidity of letting it all get to me.


But it's not the "soccer is a foreign sport that will never catch on in America" crowd, which slammed its bloated ass right down on the "not enough scoring" argument and refuses to budge. It's not the blowhards on the Right turning soccer into the nativist's wet dream of stereotypes they disgustingly throw up as an example of American culture's supposed downward spiral. It's not the ICBMs of patronizing language launched from across the Atlantic that America's efforts to play and understand the game are laughable and naive. It's not even painfully unfunny sports columnists latching on to the game like leeches, sucking with all their might for a tiny bit of bloody fodder to fill up their inches.


Nope. None of that really bothers me. I can compartmentalize the vacuous holes from which prattle like that emanates, setting them aside cleanly; even when that's made difficult by a particularly noxious bit of bluster, they soon fade out, as if they were the vuvuzelas of the World Cup conversation. Annoying, certainly, but hardly a major distraction.


What is getting to me is the question. You know the one I'm talking about - it pops up every four years in June, goes something like "Is this the year soccer finally becomes big in America?", and spawns article after article proposing why soccer's time has finally come. The question is ridiculous, as are any tidy summations that attempt to answer it, and I'm ready to murder my newsreader as a result. It would be a mercy killing.


The problem with the question is that it rests on two annoying, and incorrect, assumptions. One, that soccer isn't already big in American (it is), and two, that soccer's popularity can or will explode overnight (it can't). Even if the U.S. National Team goes all the way to pull off the biggest miracle run in the history of international soccer by winning the World Cup, soccer's front-pageiness (yeah, I made that up) would be ephemeral. Soon enough, the talking heads and columnists would turn their attention back to Kobe v. MJ, the labor dispute in the NFL, Tiger's petulance, etc. Soccer would be but a blip, even with the greatest title in world sports in American hands.


The game is growing in popularity, period. Quantifying how much it's growing is difficult. Pinning down the moment, be it now, five years from now, or a generation on where it "turns the corner", "breaks through", "blows up", so on and so forth is as annoying as it is unnecessary.


So stop it. I like my newsreader, it would be pity to have to put it down.