Three days before the 1999 Women’s World Cup began, Brandi Chastain made an appearance on “Late Show With David Letterman.” Mia Hamm, the reluctant superstar, had declined, so Chastain went instead. Her nickname among teammates was Hollywood. It’s likely that few viewers knew who she was. But no one, we soon learned, was better prepared for bright lights and big moments.

Three weeks later, Chastain scored the decisive penalty to defeat China, 5-4, in the final in front of 90,125 fans at the Rose Bowl, the largest official crowd ever to watch women’s soccer. About 40 million Americans watched at least part of the match on television.

In that pivotal moment of arrival for women’s team sports in the United States and around the world, viewers saw Chastain removing her jersey and twirling it like a lariat, spinning around and falling to her knees, pumping her arms in exultant triumph. What resulted was perhaps the most iconic photograph ever taken of a female athlete, a depiction of pure spontaneous joy.

It was a moment of freedom and liberation, Marlene Bjornsrud, a longtime women’s coach and an influential sports executive, once told me. She called it a “casting off the burden of everything that kept us down and said, ‘You can’t do that because you are a woman.’ It was a moment that screamed, ‘Yes, I can.’”