Can you all stop this, "Is this going to be a defining moment for U.S. soccer" talk? All this, "Will America learn to love this game" chatter? All this, "How do we seize the momentum?" garbage?

News Flash: There will be no defining moment. The bottom line is, we're making progress.

	The question is, can Landon & Co. keep soccer fever going?

Trust me, this was a whole lot fresher topic back in the late '70s when I was coming back from Cosmos games in the back of Mr. Brooks' station wagon. That was 25 years ago. The game keeps on keepin' on, as they say, and guess what? There's still a lot of grinding left to do. In fact, it's never going to stop.

Look at it this way: In 1990, we sent a college team to the World Cup. In 2002, we sent a pro team, replete with a pair of 20-year-olds who'd been pros for three and four years.

But the hard work has just begun. The most valuable lesson we've learned in the past dozen years is that improving the quality of U.S. Soccer is a whole lot easier when there's a decent professional league up and running. And, to that end, we've learned just how hard it is to keep a league up and running.

The U.S. national team program would be a joke were it not for MLS. While some European clubs have shown a little more regard for American players in the past six seasons, most of them kick and scream a little before they admit that Americans are improving.

The one and only place in the world where American players are counted on to perform, to lead and to score, is MLS. That the 2002 World Cup team had some players ready to stand toe-to-toe with Portugal and Germany is a credit to MLS, which performed the job of hardening some boys into men.

Spare me the "MLS won't be worthy until there's promotion and relegation" e-mails, okay? I happen to agree that some sort of promotion and relegation would be novel (on the American sports landscape) and a nifty experiment for MLS, but it's not happening. So, let's stop wasting bytes on it, okay?

It's more important for MLS to figure out how to present games in a way that will start to catch the attention of non-believing soccer fans. Note, I didn't say non-soccer fans. I said "non-believing" soccer fans. The soccer fans out there who think MLS is garbage. It's my opinion that if you put MLS games in better atmospheres, on better fields, more people would start to see that the soccer is pretty good, especially for a six-year-old league.

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Related Aside Here: On July 27, the Fire and MetroStars are scheduled to play the ESPN2 Soccer Saturday Game of the Week on the Fire's makeshift home field at North Central College in Naperville, Ill. If there's any way MLS can pull the plug on this matchup and get another game on national TV, the league should do it. The Fire have played two nationally televised matches from Naperville already this year and, quite frankly, this is not the image the league wants out there if it wants to convince fans that MLS is Major League.

The field is not only made of plastic (SafePlay, a surface similar to what the Devil Rays play on at Tropicana Field) and marked with non-removable football lines, but it is too small for a U-16 game. Players running into each other, getting aggravated. All in all, we can draw the conclusion now, that MLS games on this field are unwatchable! Do yourself a favor, MLS, and try to keep the Naperville Nightmare a secret from the world.

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But, as I was saying, MLS needs to keep working on its game presentation skills. A few years ago, I sat in the stands at Maine Road, watching Manchester City play Lincoln City in an English third division game. I am not exaggerating when I say that the game was horrible. Neither team could keep the ball in bounds. Lincoln City's keeper clearly lived on a training diet of meat pies and pints of bitter.

Yet, there were 32,000 fans in the stands watching the match, so it didn't seem half that bad. If, say, the Dallas Burn were wearing Man City uniforms and the New England Revs wore Lincoln City shirts, I doubt any of the fans in the seats would've walked away complaining about the quality of play.

Of course, Crew Stadiums don't get built in a year. No, they don't. They get built in nine months! So, how about it, Mr. Anschutz? I know you've got a glitzy palace going up in Carson for the Galaxy and the U.S. national teams. But how about doing something for your other clubs that are mired in gargantuan stadiums?

How about trying again to do one of those modular jobs you almost pulled off in Arlington Heights for the Fire last year? Can't be a worse test balloon than what you've tried to pull off in Naperville this year. If there's no land in Chicago, do one in Jersey or D.C. Just do one to see if it works.

I know it's not my money, Mr. Anschutz, but do it in the name of progress.

No,  U.S. soccer folks should not be looking at this as some fleeting opportunity to cash in on the success of the U.S. men's national team in South Korea. They should consider it all part of the grind to build the game.

Doomsayers will spout off if DaMarcus Beasley, Clint Mathis and Landon Donovan all end up in Europe and out of MLS. Rose-colored-glasses kinds of people will say, if those three bolt for Europe, it makes the U.S. a little more like Argentina and Brazil, two countries that regularly sell players to the big money leagues. But really, what's said or not said means little.

That's the lesson we should've all learned by now.

Jeff Bradley is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at jeff.bradley@espnmag.com.