LYON, France — Rose Lavelle was 9½ — the half is important, if you’re 9 — when the women that changed everything arrived in Cincinnati.

It was October 2004, a few months after the United States women’s soccer team had won the gold medal in the Athens Olympics, five years after it had conquered the world. Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain and the rest were traveling the country, playing exhibition games, as a sort of victory tour.

Lavelle was there to watch at the Paul Brown Stadium for a game against New Zealand. It was more of a carnival than a contest: the Americans won, 6-0, the sort of procession that — in the eyes of a child — befitted their greatness. Lavelle fell for them, and fell hard.

She became “obsessed,” she said a few weeks ago, with the team that would go down in history as the 99ers, the team that won the World Cup on home soil in the year that became its calling card, the team that transformed the arc of women’s soccer in the United States and, more slowly, around the globe.