Ronald Reagan was president and the movie "Top Gun" was breaking box office records the last time the United States failed to qualify for the World Cup in 1986.
Back then, outside a tiny minority of soccer diehards, nobody in America even cared; the tournament might have been held on Mars, for all most people knew. After all, the list of failures to qualify dated back to 1950, the year of a fabled 1-0 win over England in Belo Horizonte.
How times change: The U.S. has been at every World Cup since 1990 and a growing army of fans not only care, but expect to see their team on the big stage.