OK, I’m ready for that massive escalation of soccer’s popularity in the United States.

You know, the one that’s predicted every four years corollary to the staging of the World Cup?

To be sure, the game has taken hold among America’s youth.

Soccer, according to various surveys, has easily passed baseball in interest level among pre-teenagers.

The problem, though, is that the sport historically has left most of the players’ and coaches’ consciousness after the high school years.

And reaction to the World Cup with the U.S. presence in it, is hardly an accurate gauge.

Americans are famously patriotic athletically and their reaction isn’t so much a love of the sport, as it is for their country and its presence in the spotlight on an international stage.

Unfortunately, that reality moves it from sports to being a news story with predictably embarrassing results.

People in my business laugh when the news side decides to thrust itself into our area, with the attitude, “We’ll show you how to really cover this story.”

Of course, newspeople are invariably bereft of any background or knowledge of the sport and thus try to fill that void with breathless reporting and absurd analogies.

That scenario is replicated pretty much any time a community’s print or broadcast news media ventures into a major sports event.

On Wednesday, I read a cityside story from a metro daily that referenced “the (U.S.) team’s improbable run at the World Cup.”

What “run”?

The United States went 1-2-1 in the planet’s premier soccer event.

It was 1-1-1 in group play and only made it to the so-called “Knockout Round,” because it had a better goal differential than Portugal, which had the same record.

Then, in that Round of 16, the Americans, though dominated by Belgium, hung tough before losing 2-1 in extra time.

That’s hardly an “improbable run,” except maybe to some of this country’s soccer experts who speculated the Americans wouldn’t even make it out of group play.

Yet the stats say such a prediction wasn’t all that ill-considered.

In fairness, three U.S. games were decided by a goal (two of them losses), plus a bad 2-2 tie with Portugal, which scored the equalizer in the final 30 seconds.

The Americans scored five World Cup goals and surrendered six … pretty equal.

But, consider this.

In time of possession, U.S. foes, on average, held the ball for 55 percent of the time and, most compellingly, had a 2-1 edge in shots … 92-46.

Stats can be deceiving, but those are telling.

Do you want more?

After winning the opener against Ghana, 2-1, the United States went 0-2-1 and endured a stretch of 206 straight minutes without a goal, starting with the second score against Portugal, through a shutout by Germany, until Tuesday’s tally against Belgium, midway through extra time.

All I know is that the United States was the largest country in the World Cup — by more than double — and what it managed was one win in four games and a total of five goals … in a year that likely will produce a tournament scoring record.

Do those numbers point to a surge in popularity of the sport in our nation?

That’s not to disparage the Americans’ performance, but rather merely to point out that it wasn’t the glittering effort the newstypes would have us believe.

Besides, the most ridiculous effort by a U.S. broadcaster came early … after the win over Ghana.

A young, female network newscaster pronounced the triumph on par with the United States’ hockey team’s “Miracle on Ice” victory in the 1980 Olympics.

Forget the fact that she wasn’t even born when the USA’s amateurs stunned the Russian “pros” in that unforgettable semifinal, how about the reality that the Americans were ranked No. 13 in the world … Ghana was 37th. In short, America was favored.

For her to invoke one of the great sports moments in modern history in comparison with an expected triumph in a World Cup opener — and the U.S., which was outplayed, still needed two fortuitous goals to survive — showed an incredible lack of perspective and perception.

But, alas, even some sports people were guilty of “World Cup fever.”

Begin with the reality that while ESPN had some expert analysts on its in-studio reports, the non-Americans were extremely difficult to understand.

Then there was Bob Ley, normally a pro’s pro, who decided his delivery should be socceresque. 

And it wasn’t just that the field became a “pitch” and zero was replaced by “nil,” but rather the grammatical concession to international English.

To Ley, during the World Cup studio sessions in Brazil, suddenly it was “the United State have” and “Sweden are,” imitating the fractured grammar of foreign announcers.

However, Ley and his co-broadcasters are now assaulting vastly fewer American ears with the United States out of the World Cup — check the TV viewership numbers with our country gone — with its residents still apparently awaiting that predicted soccer “explosion.”

(Chuck Pollock, the Times Herald sports editor, can be reached at cpollock@oleantimesherald.com)