THAT GIRL

For Brandi Chastain, American icon in Australia, the Olympic women’s soccer tournament represents a welcome change in the conversation.

For the next two weeks, she can discuss playing soccer Down Under, after having spent the previous year talking about what a soccer player dons under.

For the record, for the 15,347th time, it was a sports bra, Chastain reminds. A jog bra. A workout bra. No satin. No lace. Something you’re more likely to see in the pages of Runner’s World than a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

Shortly after winning the 1999 Women’s World Cup with her climactic penalty kick and off-with-the-top celebration, Chastain was riding in a cab through New York’s Central Park en route to a meeting with her agent.

“In Central Park, people work out in all different varieties of attire,” Chastain says. “I saw a woman jogging in her jog bra and so when I got to my agent I said, ‘Oh my God, John, you must call the press. There’s a woman jogging in Central Park in her jog bra. It must make front page.’ ”

Chastain laughs at her own joke.

“I mean, what’s the big deal?” she says. “People have been doing it for a long time.”

America, however, reacted as if Chastain had posed nude in a national magazine. Which, in fact, she had, weeks before the World Cup, wearing nothing but her soccer boots while strategically cradling a soccer ball.

That provocative photograph caused barely a ripple. But the shot of Chastain in a moment of unadulterated jubilation, on her knees and waving her jersey above her head in the time-honored soccer tradition, became the U.S. sports photo of 1999, splashed across the covers of news magazines, replayed on television again and again, even spawning national debate over whether Chastain’s jersey-tug was proper for public display.

At last year’s Junior Miss America pageant, contestants were asked if Chastain had set a negative example for young girls with her goal celebration.

“Ooh,” Chastain says, wincing, “that was a tough one.

“And I met one of those girls after. You know, they have to answer the questions politically correct. I mean, they don’t answer the questions how they truly feel. I think they answer the question that could win them the title. Whether that’s right or wrong, I’m not here to judge on that. So that was kind of odd.

“And then I did finally meet her and she didn’t know it was me. I was on some Fox interview show or something and we start talking about the soccer and I said, ‘How about that question?’ And she made a comment and I said, ‘That was me.’ And she was, like, ‘Ooh. That was you?’

“I said, ‘Don’t worry, I don’t care what your comment was. I know you’re answering for the judges.’ It was a very loaded question. I think her response was something like, ‘I wouldn’t have done it. I don’t think it’s appropriate.’ All the right things that she should have said for that time.”

Still, Chastain delights in the fact that one of her U.S. national teammates, Tisha Venturini, was one of the pageant judges.

“Tisha was a judge on that, so [the contestant] probably got marked down,” Chastain says with a mischievous grin. “So it backfired on her, didn’t it?”

The commotion, in large part, was simply the result of mainstream America’s unfamiliarity with international soccer. Basketball players don’t regularly rip off their shirts after scoring important baskets--Dennis Rodman was the exception--but you virtually can’t watch a European or Latin American soccer match without seeing a frenzied goal-scorer ace the shirt as he performs the lambada with the corner flag.

“Which ones haven’t done it?” Chastain says. “I think a lot them do it. I think you see a lot of guys pull . . . their shirts up with political slogans [on undershirts] on their chest.”

Or even go further than that. Earlier this year, a male Iranian player was fined $1,200 and suspended for six months for celebrating a goal by taking off his jersey . . . and pulling down his shorts.

“Somebody sent me an e-mail about that and said, ‘Brandi, I don’t think you need to go this far,’ ” Chastain says with a laugh. “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

Chastain even caught flak from some media critics for conspiring with her sponsor, Nike, to turn her goal celebration into a free advertisement, in front of millions of television viewers, for Nike sports bras.

Well, of course. Chastain and Nike obviously knew that China and the United States would play 120 minutes of scoreless soccer in the World Cup final and the match would go to penalty kicks and U.S. keeper Brianna Scurry would save one and the winning kick would come down to the Americans’ fifth and final penalty taker and that player would be Chastain.

Of course.

“I think people who are uneducated about the situation still bring it up,” Chastain says. “But that has basically gone away.”

But talk about being at the right place at the right time with the right left foot.

What if Chastain hadn’t been fifth in the penalty shootout lineup?

Suppose she had been fourth and her successful kick had simply set the stage for another teammate to bury the winner.

How different would her life be today?

“You know, I haven’t really thought about it,” she says. “We all would have shared in the same joy and same spotlight that we did. Maybe it would be a little different. Of course, who knows what I would have done if I had been fourth? Maybe something as silly as I did. I don’t know. I don’t think you can go back and say, ‘What if it had been?’ There’s no reason to. It’s only looking forward from here on out.”

Say this for Chastain: When the moment was at hand, she grabbed it and ran a marathon with it. Without question, she was the biggest individual winner in the post-World Cup mania. Mia Hamm was already the most familiar face in women’s soccer before the first ball in the World Cup was kicked. Scurry became a hero for the shot she saved in the shootout, but 14 months later, she no longer starts for Team USA.

Chastain catapulted from potential tournament goat--her own goal against Germany nearly ended the Americans’ run in the quarterfinals--to one of People magazine’s 20 most intriguing people of 1999 and one of Street & Smith’s 100 most powerful sports people.

She has even attained the height of Q-rating coronation: Having her name dropped by Regis Philbin on the game show, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” As in: “Who scored the winning penalty kick for the United States during the 1999 Women’s World Cup soccer final?”

“It was the $32,000 question,” Chastain says, then with a grin adds, “Should have been the million-dollar question.”

During the first month after the World Cup, Chastain says, “I don’t think I slept very much. I don’t think I ate very much. It was a pure adrenaline rush. It was just working on overdrive. It was amazing, the people that came out of the woodwork to say, ‘I’ve never watched a soccer game in my life, but I’m a soccer fan forever now. I can’t miss a game that you play.’

And, she says, no regrets for the liftoff that precipitated the lift off.

“No,” Chastain says. “It happened. I’m happy I did it. I think it was a liberating moment for myself. I think, hopefully, it was a liberating moment for many others, male or female.”

Chastain mentions a letter she received from a college student who had watched the World Cup with his buddies. “He wrote . . . saying, ‘Thank you very much for the World Cup. We’ve never been soccer fans before, but we are big fans of the women’s national team now.’

“And on his spring break he came out to watch us play and said, ‘Because of you and your teammates, I’ve rededicated myself to working out and I’ve lost 150 pounds. I feel good about myself. I never would have done it, had I not watched the World Cup.’

“So, I think that’s a healthy start, hopefully. We have an epidemic, I think, of young kids being overweight and maybe not feeling good about themselves. And so, if this starts people on the right track, then, it’s a good thing.”