SEATTLE — To this day, Clint Dempsey can recall exactly where he was when the United States national soccer team upset Mexico at the 2002 World Cup.

Dempsey had just finished his freshman year at Furman, and he considered himself lucky to have earned a scholarship even to such a small Division I school. The time difference between Furman’s campus in Greenville, S.C., and Jeonju, South Korea, where the United States match was played, necessitated an early-morning alarm to allow Dempsey to watch the game live in his dormitory.

The star of that game is easy for Dempsey to remember: It was a rising prospect named Landon Donovan, who scored the second goal that sank the Mexicans and went on to be named the tournament’s best young player. Though Donovan, then 20, was only a year and five days older than Dempsey, the gap in their games then was yawning.

“I was nowhere close to being with the national team at that time,” Dempsey said in an interview last week. “I was just a fan like everybody else.”