CHOFU, Japan — Five years they had waited for this game.
Five years since Sweden had dashed the United States women’s soccer team’s hopes for an Olympic gold medal at the 2016 Rio Games. Five years since a defeat that forced the Americans to look in the mirror and ask hard questions about their age, their dominance.
Five years of waiting, only to end up right back in the same place.
The United States opened the Tokyo Olympics on Wednesday just as they had ended the Rio Games five years earlier: on the wrong end of a humbling, embarrassing defeat to Sweden.