They look at Christine Sinclair or Diana Matheson or Jessie Fleming and they can see themselves.

If it were a movie, it would be called "A Mirror of Their Own."

The Canadian women's national soccer team — which will play Germany in a nationally televised game at Tim Hortons Field Sunday afternoon — is not just the most popular "football" side in this country.

It is also a tangible beacon of possibility to thousands of young Canadian female soccer players, and even those girls who are merely considering taking up the game.

Role models who are female; sports idols who look like them.

"There are a lot of role models now," agrees 14-year-old Alexis Van Aken of Hamilton United, the top local team for girls under 15.

"We know some of the older girls like (Ancaster's) Melissa Tancredi. She was a wonderful player. And Christine Sinclair, all the girls know her; she's a big role model for a lot of girls our age, and younger and older.

"It's important because all the girls need a little influence in their life to be the best player they can."

Samantha Pavao, 14, of Hamilton Sparta in the Hamilton District League, adds: "There weren't a lot of top girls' teams before. There were just a lot of male teams. Now young girls have something to look forward to."

Canada has had a national women's team for 32 years and, globally, women have had a World Cup since 1995 and Olympic inclusion since 1996.

But the Canadian players were not widely known until the clear turning point in the national team's competitive, and cultural-status, narrative: the heartbreaking, valiant and controversial 4-3 loss to the world-dominant U.S. in the semifinals of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

Three days later, Oakville's Matheson scored the biggest goal in Canadian soccer history for a 1-0 victory over favoured France and the bronze medal as the Nationals rocketed into sea-to-sea-to-sea prominence. Canada followed that up with another Olympic bronze in Rio two years ago.

Over those half-dozen years, many of the Canadians have become household names, especially if those households contain sports-active females.

One of those was the Fleming household in London, Ont. Jessie Fleming remembers being 14 and watching the London, England Olympics on TV with her father and understanding that she was seeing something extraordinary, but something she might eventually be able to do herself.

"I looked at people like D (Matheson) who play midfield as something that was attainable," says the 20-year-old midfielder, now one of the national team's anchor players. "People who I thought I could play like and just being connected to them as Canadians, as women, for sure that helped."

Many of the early Canadian women's hockey Olympians grew up with only NHL players as their idols, but then became the idols themselves to a younger generation of female players. Matheson, now 34, says it was similar for her in soccer with only the big European men's games broadcast on TV, so only male players to emulate.

"There was a women's national team but you really had to dig hard to learn something about them," she recalls. "There were (pioneering stars such as) Charmaine Hooper and Andrea Neil, but they didn't play a ton of games. They rarely played games at home and there were no women's pro leagues like there are now. So you watched men's soccer on TV.

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"You want the younger girls in the stands on Sunday to be inspired by the way that Jessie plays and hopefully in five or six years, they come through and are even better than we are, and they're inspiring the next generation."

There are roughly 700,000 registered players in Canada aged 18 and younger and 39 per cent of them are females. In the Hamilton district, the female registration trends slightly higher, with 6,500 accounting for 43 per cent of youth-age players.

That's vast and fertile ground for motivational icons, and the process of identifying and being inspired is real, say Simone Alexiou of Hamilton United U-15s, and 13-year-old Sparta goalie Jessica Ferguson.

"It seems like it's far away, but it's really not," Alexiou explains. "Often the guys' teams get looked at a lot more, so to have female teams that are doing really well, is good for us to see."

Ferguson, who follows Canadian goalie Stephanie Labbe on Instagram, adds that, "I watch them for their techniques: they're better, technique-wise, than the Canadian men."

Fleming made her debut with the Canadian national team before she was 16 and really came to the fore during the 2015 Pan Am Games in Hamilton. She recognizes how quickly she's gone from having role models to being one.

"I know; it's crazy," she says, shaking her head in amazement. "That's one of the biggest compliments you could give me. It's what we want to do.

"Hopefully, they see that we're having fun; I think that's what inspired me about that London team: how hard they played for each other, and the enjoyment piece of it. It looked like they were having fun out there.

"That's the true role model."

smilton@thespec.com

905-526-3268 | @miltonatthespec