FADED GLORY

It was a moment of indescribable joy for Cammi Granato and Dot Richardson. It was also a moment of poignant remembering.

As Brandi Chastain ripped off her soccer jersey and fell to her knees and as an entire nation cheered or cried--or cheered and cried--Granato and Richardson rejoiced and remembered.

These two athletes also were, for just a second, part of teams that charmed the United States and were reported to be trendsetters, image busters, pathfinders for women’s team sports in this country.

Richardson was the bubbly medical student on the 1996 U.S. Olympic gold-medal winning softball team, the one that played its games 90 minutes from Atlanta, in Columbus, Ga., was barely seen on television and still forced its way into our viewfinders because of the gutsy way the women played and the way their joy was so unaffected by a demand for money or a search for TV cameras.

Granato was the Mia Hamm of the 1998 women’s U.S. Olympic gold-medal winning hockey team, the photogenic star, the shy holder of all the expectations of being the best women’s hockey player in the world. When the final game against Canada was over, this team gathered on the ice for a group hug, cry and madcap skate with a large American flag. Suddenly patriotism didn’t seem corny, and this team came home to a whirlwind week or so of White House visits and David Letterman appearances. And then?

Nothing.

Granato watched the World Cup soccer championship game from a hotel room in Salt Lake City. She had bought Rose Bowl tickets for the game but then was invited to participate in a retreat for selected athletes who are expected to play important parts in the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. So Granato gathered with a luge competitor, snowboarder, skier and cheered her lungs out for players like Hamm and Julie Foudy--”I’ve met them before,” Granato says without a bit of guile--”and they were really nice to me and introduced me to people.”

If it occurs to you that Granato was momentarily as famous as Hamm and Foudy and that her awe-struck statement of meeting them seems false modesty, forget that thought.

For while Granato got goose bumps on her arms and tears in her eyes at the end of the soccer game, she can’t help wishing for an outlet for her own competitive instincts. She knows she is not famous now.

“I’ve only played 11 games since the Olympics,” Granato says from her home in Manhattan Beach, “and only three of those were in the United States.

“Watching the soccer team celebrate, I felt so good for those girls. But I also realized how extremely disappointing it’s been for us. To go [to the Olympics] and finally get the chance to be athletes at a world level and then, the day it’s over, to be forgotten in a sense. That’s hard. You make up all this ground, then, the day the Olympics is over, there’s no other reason for us. In a sense we’ve just been sitting and waiting for Salt Lake City.

“When I watched the soccer team, I realized how much I miss the competition. That’s the thing. Missing the competition.”

Granato spent last winter as a broadcaster with the Kings and expects to do the same, at least part time, this winter. She also expects to be part of the USA Hockey women’s team that will be formed again, to begin slowly preparing for those 2002 Games. Granato understands that her performance in Nagano and the fame that came, however briefly, for winning the gold medal at a time when the U.S. men’s team was disgracing itself with frat-boy foolishness in the dorms, probably helped bring her a chance to broadcast NHL games. But that is not what she wanted.

“We’d hoped a professional league of some sort would have started by now,” Granato says. “I really believe one would have worked.”

That’s the same optimism that accompanies the women’s soccer team.

Did you know, by the way, that there is a women’s professional softball league? It is called, creatively enough, the Women’s Pro Softball League and has six teams--the Tampa Bay FireStix, Georgia Pride, Carolina Diamonds, Akron Racers, Virginia Roadsters and Durham Dragons.

And the perpetually perky Richardson, who earlier this month finished her five-year orthopedic surgery residency at USC and will be starting a fellowship with Drs. James Kerlan and Frank Jobe next fall, says the league is doing well. “Attendance is good,” Richardson says, “and fans love it.”

A gentle reminder that no one out here seems to have heard of the WPSL and that, therefore, it might not be a resounding success, does cause Richardson, who is 37 now and playing for the United States on the Pan Am Games team, to admit that the WPSL hasn’t exactly taken the nation by storm.

Richardson, who aims to play in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, and then concentrate on becoming both an orthopedic surgeon and eventual USA Olympic softball coach, says she hopes “our team in 1996 was a spark and helped launch what you are seeing now in women’s sports. I’ve been told over and over that NBC’s only regret about 1996 was not showing our gold-medal game. That won’t happen in 2000, I’ve been promised. All the U.S. games will be on TV, either the cable outlet or network. That’s progress.”

It is indeed, and both Granato and Richardson insist that women’s pro sports leagues in hockey and soccer are past due and would be successful.

“It’s not like we want to make a lot of money,” Granato says. “We just want to be able to play our sport. The Canadian and Finnish women [silver and bronze winners in Nagano] went home to play in very successful club systems. Only the girls going back to college have a real outlet in the U.S.”

As Granato and Richardson talk, you realize how hard this is.

To have finally earned the chance to play at the highest level and beat the best athletes from around the world, to have that life-altering experience and then be expected to shove back in the envelope all that you’ve found out about competing, winning, waving the flag or being on the cover of every magazine in the newsstand, to be expected to just go away and come back in four years, it’s impossible.

If a successful women’s pro soccer league is the result of this World Cup adrenaline rush, it will surprise nearly everybody but Granato, Richardson and the soccer gold-medal winners. We Americans can rev it up for the big event and, honestly, it is tremendous progress that women athletes can now create a big event.

But after the U.S. soccer players got done being stars once more on the Letterman show Tuesday night, what do you want to bet we don’t see them much again until the 2000 Olympics?

“I hope not,” Granato says softly. But without a ton of conviction.

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.