On occasion we like to ask a simple question to help describe a far more complicated event: What does it all mean?

So, as we step away from the enthralling and disheartening results of the sensational run of the American team through the Women's World Cup, this is one of those moments that practically demands the question. Just for a moment, let's push aside the little-picture sniping of some curmudgeons who prefer to argue about whether the heavily favored U.S. team deserves the unkind label of championship chokers and instead focus on the bigger and far more significant picture.

What does it all mean?

Something remarkable happened over the past week to soccer in America. For the second time in 12 years, the World Cup women put a grip on the proprietary rights to the title of "The Future of Soccer in America." What the dearly departed NASL, MISL and current Major League Soccer have been unable to do with men as the headliners, the American women have done once again on a global stage. While fleeting as it may be, the U.S World Cup ladies have captured the imagination of an American nation that has steadfastly resisted falling in love with soccer as a spectator sport.

I was traveling Sunday when the World Cup final between the U.S. and Japan began, but by the time I landed at Lambert airport 20 minutes after the game had started, the first thing I noticed were the crowds in every bar and restaurant. And all the televisions were tuned to the World Cup. This was St. Louis in July, with the home team in first place playing its hottest rival, but hardly anyone was watching the Cardinals and Reds. What a sight it was to see all these televisions on the soccer game.

All these eyes - almost all of them adult males - were glued to the TV watching the women play, and they were cheering and groaning like this was the World Series or the Final Four or a football playoff.

These scenes were repeated in thousands of places all around the country. Men and women, boys and girls. On Monday, it was announced that the game had registered the second-highest television rating in the U.S. for women's soccer, being seen in 7.4 percent of American households in the nation's markets that are measured electronically, second only to the 1999 World Cup final. Even more impressive than that, ESPN - which carries the MLS and the top European professional leagues on its channels - announced that Sunday's game was the highest-rated soccer match it had ever shown, with an estimated 13.5 million viewers.

So, what does it all mean? It means progress. Don't look for this as some landmark moment that means the global game has finally got its hooks into the general American public, because we know that's not true. Those TV ratings say as much about the patriotic habits of American sports fans as they say about their appetite for world-class soccer.

We like to wave the flag. We love to chant "U-S-A! U-S-A!" That's why every four years the Olympic TV ratings are so good, even if the sports are practically nonexistent on the American sports TV radar during non-Olympic years.

The reality is that Hope Solo - the most telegenic star in American soccer - once played on a professional women's soccer team here in St. Louis, and that team folded from terminal lack of local interest. And St. Louis is supposed to be a soccer hotbed. The reality is, when Solo, Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan and the other stars of this silver-medal winning World Cup team return to America , some of them will return to play in six-team pro league that has generated scant interest (average attendance is less than 2,000).

But that is beside the point. What they are doing now - and their 1999 World Cup champion predecessors did in the past - is keep the groundswell of participatory soccer bubbling in this country, particularly among young, athletic girls who dream of being the next generation of World Cup heroines. That is fairly heady stuff. And right now that ought to be enough as far as the Big Picture goes. Everyone keeps thinking that every time a women's team sport and an American team becomes a bit of a national sensation, that the only way to measure success is whether it translates into success as a spectator sport to the American consumer.

Not since the racial pioneering era of black athletes in the 1940s and '50s have we seen a group of world-class American athletes who graciously handle such farfetched burdens as the women on the U.S. World Cup team. Carrying generations of aspiring young female footballers on your back in 2011 may not be quite up to the demands of hoisting an entire race on your shoulders in 1951, but there are some notable similarities.

I would prefer not to demand that they come home and immediately expect that women's pro teams will begin popping up like weeds all over the land. Women's pro soccer didn't sustain after the '99 World Cup success and I doubt if it will happen in the aftermath of the '11 team's sensational run. This year's squad complained a bit about the endless comparisons to the legends of 1999 and hoped they could end that conversation, and of course they got their wish. That talk ended the moment they failed to win the gold medal and instead came away with silver.

And just like little sisters who press their backs up to their more accomplished big sisters to see if they are starting to measure up, the '11 American women are still standing on their tip toes and not quite up to the task.

But that's not necessarily such a bad thing. The '99 U.S. squad was a singular sensation. They played that World Cup tournament on American soil, traveling across the land and filling up some of this country's biggest football stadiums from New York to California. They captivated this country for three weeks, had all those outsized personalities and the single most celebrated moment in American soccer history - yes, Brandi Chastain's little penalty kick and sports bra show. Now the stars of that team are household names in the American sports culture. Mia Hamm did TV commercials with Michael Jordan and married a baseball star. Julie Foudy, Chastain, Hamm, Briana Scurry and former coach Tony DiCicco were sitting either in the booth or studio commenting on Team '11.

But the greatest accomplishment that this year's national team can cling to is knowing that they are a part of sustaining the dream that can't be measured in the short term. It will take another decade or maybe another generation before women's pro soccer makes any meaningful ripples in this country.

But what if Solo, Wambach and the rest of this generation's stars are able to keep growing the game in ways no other American team before them did? What if they become the team that taps into an even larger core of young female athletes in this country and starts luring them away from tennis, basketball, softball or track and field?

And with the Olympics only a year from affording them back-to-back summers of highly rated national TV exposure, maybe the 2011 squad will look back one day and say they did accomplished something that even the Golden Girls of 1999 couldn't.