BY Mike Lupica

During World Cup, United States Men's National Soccer Team starts to feel a little like 'Miracle in Brazil'

There was the 2-1 win over Ghana, then that spectacular 2-2 draw against Portgual. And even when they lost, 1-0, to Germany last Thursday afternoon, we saw something with great clarity: Our guys really can play with the big boys now.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Monday, June 30, 2014, 11:19 PM

Images cannot be used in books or individually in the form of mobile alert services or downloads without prior approval from FIFA

This is what you hear about soccer in the United States: You hear that soccer can never be as big here as it is in the big soccer countries around the world because our best athletes, at least not enough of them, will never come to soccer first. In the other countries, their LeBrons start kicking a ball and here, first chance they get, they try to dunk it. Or throw it down the field to a speeding wide receiver. Or hit it out of sight with a bat in their hands.

And there is something to that. Just maybe not on Tuesday afternoon in the World Cup, when it is the United States against Belgium, a chance at the quarterfinals on the line, a chance for Jurgen Klinsmann’s players to keep this run of theirs going; a chance to keep the stage.

You see how the whole thing continues to build. There was the 2-1 win over Ghana, then that spectacular 2-2 draw against Portgual. And even when they lost, 1-0, to Germany last Thursday afternoon, we saw something with great clarity: Our guys really can play with the big boys now.

Did Germany outplay the U.S. in that game? If you saw the game you know they did. But our guys outplayed the Portuguese before that, before the great Ronaldo made a play at the end and got them a draw. Clint Dempsey nearly did the same for the U.S. with a header against Germany. If the sides weren’t even that day, they were close enough.

Now comes this game against Belgium, a team that has not yet lost in the tournament. Now comes another shot at showing the country and the world that if we still aren’t getting the best athletes to soccer, we are getting enough of them to go toe-to-toe with anybody.

At least now we know, fully, what it feels like everywhere else during the World Cup.

You know when soccer will be bigger than ever in this country? Six o’clock today when the U.S. has more goals than Belgium.

You know when Olympic hockey became as big as it has ever been in this country? When we beat the Russians and then won the gold medal in Lake Placid 34 years ago. The late, great Herb Brooks pushed and yelled and motivated his players to that moment. Now Klinsmann, a World Cup hero from another country, tries to do the same.

“What (Klinsmann) is doing is why we’re cheering his team the way we are,” Jim Craig, the goalie on Herb Brooks’ team, says to me.

I was there for every game Brooks’ team played in Lake Placid, and remember, the way everybody who was there remembers, what it was like dealing with him. And how much people complained about him. He never cared. He would have said anything to win the game. Klinsmann is the same, trying to write his own story, the biggest and best story ever written about his sport in his adopted country.

Wrap cover for July 1, 2014 edition of New York Daily News.

Jurgen Klinsmann doesn’t care what you think or what I think. He frankly didn’t care what Landon Donovan, the star of the U.S. World Cup team four years ago, the hero of the game against Algeria, thought when he decided Donovan wasn’t a good enough player anymore to make his team. Klinsmann cares about Dempsey and Michael Bradley and Tim Howard. He cares about Omar Gonzalez, coming off playing the game of his life in front of Howard against Germany. Klinsmann, as much the star of this team as any of them, really only cares about his team doing enough against Belgium to make it to the weekend.

He doesn’t care what anybody thought when he said his team wasn’t good enough to go all the way. That was then. This is now. Now means Belgium, another game that feels like the biggest we’ve ever had. Now Klinsmann is telling his players not to plan on returning from Brazil until July 13, hours after the final in Rio. Again: He says a lot of things. To get the best out of the injured Rob McClanahn in the Olympics, Herb Brooks did everything except call the kid a coward. And then the kid screamed that he’d play on one leg if he had to.

“That’s just how you have to approach a World Cup,” Klinsmann says now. “No matter what happens now you can always change your flights. So it’s better to start with the end in mind. The end is July 13.”

It is why nobody wants the run to end against Belgium in Salvador on Tuesday afternoon. I was talking about this with a young friend, Kofi Agyapong, who only made it to this country from Ghana because of the skill and magic and speed he brought to soccer. He played with my youngest son in high school, and went first to Wake Forest and then Columbia, and later won two national titles with the junior team for the Columbus Crew of the MLS.

This is what he said about the team we have sent to Brazil:

“Every country is there to win the crown as world champions. I think the United States is there for that and something else. Something bigger than just the trophy. And that is to play for the people of America. It’s not a team anymore. It’s started to feel like 11 of the other team is taking on all of us. It’s never been like this. And it’s an unbelievable feeling.”

It has been all of that, and will be again for the Belgium game. It will be an unbelievable feeling for all the crowds who will watch another game in malls and parks and bars and offices and living rooms; the ones who will watch on their phones or listen on the radio and cheer Jurgen Klinsmann’s team.

At least now we know, fully, what it feels like everywhere else during the World Cup. Maybe we’re not ready to be the best team in the world. Klinsmann just wants to be the best today.