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Some have anointed this year's FC Gold Pride squad with this moniker, and I think there's a real case to be made. But how soon, also, we forget the past. People in college now would have been in their tweens when the Washington Freedom won the last WUSA championship in 2003, and it's hard to be objective at that age. It's also hard to be objective when you're older but it's the first real club soccer you've experienced, and a team wins in overtime on the most perfectly dramatic run-of-play goal. Damn, though, was that a good team. There has been no player with the pure skills of Marta in women's soccer, but that Freedom squad had Mia Hamm PLUS Abby Wambach PLUS Jen Grubb PLUS Lori Lindsay PLUS Steffi Jones etc etc. Some of those players were at their peak and some were just on the way up, but when you've got the best player in the world at the time sending in crosses to the woman who's going to become the best player in the world, it's a pretty potent offense. Siri Mullinix was the back-up goalie on the national team at the time, and plenty thought she should have been starting. They were also just fun, in the way FC Gold Pride is fun to watch today. The major difference was that it seemed less inevitable that they were going to win. That Founders Cup III final was tight. With Gold Pride, especially toward the end of the season, it just seemed inevitable. It's not entirely clear who plays in the tougher league. WUSA had the Germans, but WPS is smaller and thus there's more competition for spots (looking back now, it seems particularly tragic that WUSA sometimes drew 7,000 fans a game, which would be a dream come true for the current league, and it seems ridiculous not to be able to sustain yourself with those numbers). Overall, I think we can agree that we have been blessed in this country with the greatest women's soccer in the world, and we've gotten a chance to enjoy it.

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