The end of the road for Megan Rapinoe: Retiring USWNT icon out to avoid another 'sick joke' as OL Reign go for NWSL Championship glory

After a difficult first season in the NWSL, the Seattle Reign - as it was known then - certainly found its feet. Across the 2014 and 2015 campaigns, the team lost just five of its 44 regular season matches.

Seattle finished 13 points clear at the top of the 2014 standings, having scored more and conceded fewer than any other side. Indeed, its +30 goal difference was far and away the best in the division. Kansas City, in second place, was closest with +7. It was a similar story in 2015 as the Reign won back-to-back Shields.

The team was an absolute dream to watch. Current Arsenal captain Kim Little ran the show in the centre of the park, with Jess Fishlock working in tandem with the Scot to form an excellent midfield partnership - and the forward line they were feeding was deadly.

Japan star Nahomi Kawasumi was magical on the ball, World Cup winner Sydney Leroux brought plenty of excitement, Bev Yanez bagged goals aplenty and Rapinoe was a nightmare for any full-back she came up against. With an excellent coach at the helm, in Laura Harvey, the Reign so often looked unbeatable – until it didn’t.

Despite comfortably being the best team in the league in 2014 and 2015, and reaching the Championship game both years, Seattle just couldn’t get the job done at the end. Kansas City, coached by future USWNT head coach Vlatko Andonovski, defeated the Reign on both occasions to win back-to-back Championship titles.

While expressing disappointment after the 2014 defeat, Rapinoe wasn’t too downbeat when talking to the press. There was a clear feeling that this wouldn’t be her final shot at this title. After all, it was only the NWSL’s second-ever season.

“When you look around our locker room and see the squad that we have, to not win it at the end is unfortunate, to know that we won the Shield [and were] the best team in the league during the regular season," she said. “But I think that this club also has a long-term goal as well. It’s not just about this year. We have a future that we are looking forward to and it will be a little bit interrupted over the next couple years [with the World Cup and the Olympics], but hopefully after that we can keep the foundation and keep going from there.”

Had you told Rapinoe then that nine years on, Seattle would fall short of reaching the Championship game again in seven of the following eight seasons, she’d have likely been surprised.

Until now, that shot at the title in 2015 was indeed the Reign’s last. After failing to reach the playoffs in 2016 and 2017, Harvey stepped down as head coach. She recommended Andonovski to replace her and that he did, guiding the club into the postseason in each of his two years in the Pacific Northwest. The team wouldn't get to the Championship game, but there were positive signs there, particularly in 2019 when Andonovski guided it into the playoffs despite a heap of injuries – Rapinoe among them.

If there was a foundation for Andonovski’s successor to build on though, the hopes of the Reign doing so were dashed by a chaotic couple of years. Covid-19 meant the 2020 campaign was cancelled, replaced by a month-long Challenge Cup and the NWSL Fall Series, which itself lasted just short of six weeks.

Then, midway through 2021, head coach Farid Benstiti, who had replaced Andonovski, resigned after the Reign had lost five of its first eight regular season games and generally underwhelmed during his spell in charge. He would later be named in the Yates Report, which documented the abusive behaviour and sexual misconduct in the NWSL, for weight-shaming players.

Interim coach Sam Laity and latterly the returning Harvey did an excellent job at steering the team into the 2021 playoffs despite all of this, but going beyond the first round was a step too far.

What has made that seven-year absence from the NWSL Championship game all the more difficult for fans of the Reign to swallow - if not those involved with the club itself - has been the success of its biggest rival.

No team in NWSL history has won more Championship titles than the Portland Thorns – and the Reign hate the Thorns. The feeling is mutual, too. In fact, when the Championship game took place at Portland’s Providence Park in 2015, fans of the Thorns showed up in numbers to cheer Kansas City on to victory over the Reign. “This actually was the moment that made me realize the rivalry,” Jocelyne Houghton, one of the vice-presidents of the Royal Guard, the Reign supporters’ group, told GOAL earlier this year.

Portland won the first ever NWSL Championship title in 2013 and triumphed in both 2017 and 2022, too. The club also has two Shields in its trophy cabinet, from 2016 and 2021, and a Challenge Cup. Oh, and it knocked the Reign out of the playoffs in 2018.

“From a significance point of a friend, I’m incredibly proud and happy for Pinoe to have this type of send-off and I hope we really f*ck it up this weekend,” Meghan Klingenberg, the Thorns defender who won the 2015 Women’s World Cup alongside Rapinoe, said ahead of the forward's final trip to Portland in September. "We don’t give a f*ck that Megan Rapinoe is coming to town and it’s her last game [here].”

Christine Sinclair, the Thorns captain, echoed the sentiment, albeit with a quote requiring fewer asterisks. “I’m going to miss playing against her, this rivalry is going to miss having her and our fans are going to miss booing her,” she said.

In an alternate universe, Portland beat Gotham in the playoff semi-finals and this Pacific Northwest derby has been brought to the Championship game for the first time. That's not the one we live in, though. Rapinoe won't have the chance to help her team secure the ultimate bragging rights this weekend, then, but she could at least set the Reign on its way to trying to catch up the title haul of its biggest rival before she signs off.

It’s not just Rapinoe’s retirement that makes a win for the Reign a narrative that some of the neutrals will get behind on Saturday, either. Alongside the USWNT icon for the past 11 years have been both Fishlock and Lauren ‘Lu’ Barnes, the latter a true model of consistency for the club and the former, as a Wales international, one of the NWSL’s greatest ever imports. Both have also played a huge part in those incredible Reign teams that have dazzled fans and come so close to the ultimate glory.

“I think that being able to spend 11 years and a long part of my career, a lot of my prime, I'm even extending that right now because I've still been doing well, it's just fun to be able to do it with people like Lu and Pinoe,” Fishlock told Indivisa earlier this year.

“It really is a gift to be able to go through all of this with two of the same kind of people who have just pushed you, hold you to a higher level, hold you to a higher standard and make sure that you don't drop. All of that together is why the longevity has stayed there.”

The sight of the three ‘OGs’ sat together in a press conference after Rapinoe's send-off game in October, wearing matching sunglasses, laughing and joking about the idea of Rapinoe paying into a retirement fund and the last of Barnes and Fishlock to hang up their boots getting to collect it, perfectly captured the essence of the camaraderie they have built up over the past decade.

"These are really special moments,” Barnes said of Rapinoe’s final weeks with the club. “I don't think we ever took it for granted in our 11 years here, one bit. That's how Pinoe lives, right? She lives in that joy and for those moments and she pushes us to also do that.”

Barnes and Fishlock might have further opportunities beyond this season, but 2023 will be the last chance for this trio to win a Championship together.

So, how will it all end? Sometimes it feels like the conclusions to these stories can be written in the stars, but Rapinoe knows full well that it can go the other way, too. After all, she experienced that very thing in Australia earlier this year.

The 38-year-old was playing the role of an impact substitute during the USWNT’s 2023 Women’s World Cup campaign, and while she couldn’t make a big enough difference off the bench in its last 16 tie with Sweden to stop the game from going to a decisive penalty shootout, she had the chance to help the reigning champion edge towards the quarter-finals, only to send her spot-kick well over the bar.

Usually so reliable from 12 yards, the disbelief on Rapinoe’s face was evident. She laughed, even. A two-time World Cup winner, recipient of the Golden Ball and Golden Boot awards four years prior and a player who had stolen the entire show as the U.S. retained its 2015 crown, was about to bow out from the biggest stage with a shocker of a penalty as the most successful team in tournament history suffered its earliest exit of all-time.

"I mean this is like a sick joke for me personally. I'm just like, ‘This is dark comedy that I missed a penalty’,” she said afterwards, but added: “I still just feel really grateful and joyful. I know it's the end and that's sad, but to know this is really the only time I've been in one of these shows, how much success I've had and how much I’ve loved playing for this team… It's been an honor."

And that feels like the difference here. Of course, the World Cup is the absolute pinnacle and to say goodbye to it in the way Rapinoe did will have been extremely disappointing. But she’s conquered that stage.

The NWSL Championship is the major title missing from an illustrious career. To retire without that, with the chances the Reign has had to win it, maybe Rapinoe wouldn’t have regrets given she has done all she can to try and guide her team to glory, but it’d surely feel like a bit of a "sick joke" of its own.

But maybe it won’t go that way. Maybe this could be one of those occasions where everything does align and sport follows the Hollywood script. Maybe the heartbreak and the close calls of the last 11 years have been building up to this perfect moment.

It has felt like that could be the case in OL Reign's playoff route so far. In Rapinoe's final-ever game in Seattle, the home side found an 87th-minute goal to secure passage to the semi-finals at the expense of Angel City. Then, last weekend, the Reign ended the hopes of the league's other Californian side, defeating the San Diego Wave, the NWSL Shield winners, on its own turf to deny it a home Championship game.

Rapinoe's farewell tour has had one more date added to it, then, and it is a date with destiny. In San Diego, on November 11, this icon will either sign off in the most idyllic manner one could imagine, or in the most heartbreaking circumstances possible.

“I don’t think it’s like the best career anyone has ever had, but it’s the best career that I could’ve had,” Rapinoe said recently. An NWSL Championship triumph would only add to that feeling of fulfilment and put the cherry on the cake as one of the most captivating players the women’s game has ever seen completes her last dance.