CHICAGO -- Samantha Johnson surveyed a frozen soccer field in the midst of winter and wondered, as she put it, what the hell she was doing. Besides shivering, presumably.

To understand why the Chicago Red Stars are not only dueling Seattle Reign FC for first place in the National Women's Soccer League this season as July comes to a close, but are likely to stake out similarly favorable positions for seasons to come, we could start with fortune favoring them with the gift of forward Christen Press. Or perhaps the day the Red Stars drafted Julie Johnston and gave her the keys to the back line quite some time before much of the world adopted her as one of the breakout stars in the World Cup. To start at the end and work backward, we could turn to the draft-day maneuvers earlier this year that provided three players who now start regularly as rookies.

But if it's a Rosetta Stone sought, start with Johnson on that frigid winter day in 2014.

No guarantee of reward had pulled her from the creature comforts, not to mention temperatures, of her California home to take part in an open tryout for the Red Stars. She was merely one of dozens of players trying to catch the eye of a franchise at that time preparing for the league's second season, each participant engaged in the professional soccer equivalent of scratching off a lottery ticket as she moved around the field. All of this little more than a year after Johnson played her final game at the University of Southern California and then quit the sport entirely, barely even touching a ball for months on end, the passion she once felt drained away by her college experience.

The Red Stars and Julie Johnston, who helps anchor the back line, haven't lost since June 6. Icon Sportswire/AP Images

She still wasn't sure she could love the game again, or that she desired to do so. Those sentiments all the more accentuated, mind you, by zero-degree weather. But something made her listen when a childhood friend who played for the Red Stars, Zakiya Bywaters, cajoled her into attending the audition.

So Johnson sprinted up and down the sideline and caught the eye of coach Rory Dames. She did enough to make an impression.

"I used to be a really good soccer player; it's somewhere in there," Johnson told herself when she returned weeks later, packed for an extended stay, to compete for a roster spot during the team's preseason. "I'll find it. Hopefully sooner rather than later."

This isn't a story about a secret strategy for success, some soccer equivalent of one of those late-night television infomercials promising staggering investment returns that the rest of world would know about if only they, too, channel-surfed in the pre-dawn hours. Talent wins. It always has and always will. The story is instead about what a franchise, specifically Dames, general manager Alyse LaHue and owner Arnim Whisler, did with an opportunity to start anew. Given a roster that could not compete for championships when the league launched in 2013, they took it as a blank slate and gave themselves three years to find the talent.

Three years to build a playoff team. What they came up with might be more than that.