“I thought I had it,” U.S. goalie Alyssa Naeher said moments after she dove to her right and deflected Lina Hurtig’s penalty shot. It appeared to be an epic save. But VAR declared that the ball crossed the goal line by the thinnest of margins to give Sweden a 5-4 shootout win — and the USWNT its earliest World Cup exit. Read about the tense, goallessmatch, the U.S.’s errant penalty-kick shooting, and what amounted to, in retiring forward Megan Rapinoe’s words, “a sick joke.”
