Wil Trapp and Clint Dempsey collided and came apart and collided again like celestial bodies in some frantic orbital dance. Or an asteroid collision, maybe.

The Crew were visiting Seattle in late April and Dempsey was Trapp’s primary defensive assignment for the duration of the afternoon. For the most part Dempsey was positionally quiet, pushed out of the area to all but abandon Jordan Morris atop the formation. As Trapp orchestrated from the deepest parts of the midfield, he pulled Dempsey in with him. Planets in sight of one another.

The collisions between the two were brief and explosive. Dempsey often stepped into Trapp’s personal space to shower him with those wrinkle-faced epithets for which he has become so well known. That was not so much of a surprise. To say that Dempsey and conflict are comfortable bedfellows even is to fall short of the enormity of the thing.

But what did surprise most were Trapp’s retorts. A few times the precocious 23-year-old, who’s spent his MLS career looking not-so-vaguely like the goofy, smiley cover boy on the old Mad Magazine, stepped back toward Dempsey and returned his fire. By the end of the match Trapp had spent as much time in Dempsey’s face as Dempsey had in his. This was not Dempsey using another player to fire his own engines. It was a firefight with equal weaponry, and it was not out of bounds to say that Dempsey had lost.

The chatter was an offshoot of the match, which Trapp did his best to influence. The Sounders won, and the Crew continued one of those MLS slides that can be arrested in the blink of a result, but Trapp was as present as he ever was. Almost everything Columbus did going forward was knitted from Trapp’s nimble feet. And Dempsey was quiet, on the field if not in his words.

This, we are learning, is a defining characteristic of Wil Trapp. He never seems to sleep.

Trapp’s wider national booster rocket never really left the pad until his first USMNT cap, a forgettable half hour against Chile in January 2015 in a game Jurgen Klinsmann dazzlingly decided to play a 3-5-2 and then abandon it forever. He has had one more full cap, and in the interim he’s played well but not paradigm-alteringly well for the U20s (in the failed 2013 U20 World Cup campaign) and the U23s (in the failed 2016 Olympic campaign). This has tempered things on a scale that would threaten his growing reputation as a candidate to start in 2018.

There are reasons for that, of course, as there always are. With Trapp the U20s and U23s have never played a style conducive to the modern No. 6, who himself requires some level of shielding. The U.S., with all its defensive might, is so used to playing two staunch primarily defensive bulwarks in front of the back line that it almost seems anathema to fit a Pirlo into this shaky tower of Jenga pieces. We understand and laud Vidal and Pogba far more than we do Pirlo and Xavi. We are a sporting culture of athletic measurables and intricate statistics, if nothing else.

Why doesn’t he defend more? Not a uniquely American question, but a uniquely antiquated one.

The modern march of the locus of power on professional soccer fields has been backward. The most recent Howler magazine focused its spotlight on the best No. 10s in history, and in so doing looked at their wider role in the modern game. Allow me to quote Matt Doyle here (who – Inception – begins here with a quote from former Brazilian star Rivelino).

“The importance of the No. 10 shirt has unfortunately ended,” said Brazilian legend Rivelino in 2014. “Today the holding midfielders open the game up more than the No. 10” That judgment was premature – nobody can look at the player who currently wears Brazil’s No. 10 shirt, Neymar, in full flight and not be impressed with how he wears it – but Rivelino (who wore No. 11 at the 1970 World Cup) was not entirely wrong. Deep-lying playmakers like Xavi, Andrea Pirlo and Bastian Schweinsteiger have dominated the past decade, changing how, and where, creativity is expressed on the soccer field.

The kernel of this idea is how we ruined Michael Bradley. Not in any physical sense – Bradley is still among the most capable midfielders in American history – but in a tactical one. Bradley could once stake a claim as the finest deep diagonal passer in USMNT history, when he did them often. But he was deemed Too Important by both Greg Vanney and Jurgen Klinsmann, and in lieu of creative midfielders higher in the formation tree Bradley was asked to be Early Juventus-era Arturo Vidal. We wanted him to be our modern midfielder but did not know how to craft him.

After all, he has an impossible work rate, he has good on-ball speed and his pass charts are routinely as efficient as we’ve ever seen on these shores. So let’s make him everything. By proxy he became a pale light at the end of the dock, reflecting as many shadows as true objects. Bradley still has a role to play for the USMNT, and he is still among the very best midfielders in American history. That is not what’s in dispute here.

How much better he could have been had he been specialized in lieu of becoming a long distance runner, we will never know. It is too late now, anyway.

This is where we see Trapp cresting the horizon, his long balls beating him to us.

In a simple way Trapp has always been very good, but this season he has become uniquely something else, something even better than before. This was through the first six weeks of the season. His pace has not abated, even as the Crew go through spasms of crisis both from within and without.

366 – @ColumbusCrewsc Wil Trapp leads all players in @MLS 2016 with 366 successful passes. Completions. — OptaJack (@OptaJack) April 18, 2016

Now, Trapp’s last five games.

Montreal (44-55 passing)

Seattle Sounders (77-86 passing)

Houston Dynamo (80-87 passing)

NYCFC (49-57 passing)

Montreal (60-73 passing)

These are manful performances worthy of adulation. More importantly, there is very little fluff here. Trapp does very little just to do it.

In each instance, too, Trapp had the No. 1 heaviest passing connection with three different players. In one game – the NYCFC game – that was with Federico Higuain. Who is, if you were not aware, almost always removed from Trapp by at least 10-15 yards.

These are not meek Mix Diskerud pass matrices, reliant on meaningless layoffs to pad out the percentage. Trapp is probing.

Let’s go back to Trapp’s moment in the sun against Seattle for a moment. It was, in my mind, his best 90-minute performance of the season amid a sea of fine ones. Columbus did not win, but they bossed a number of meaningful passages, and most of those began with Trapp.

If we have learned anything from Gregg Berhalter’s time in Columbus (and from Trapp’s formative time at Akron, where he played a similar role) it is that Americans are capable of playing the modern style of the game if given ample opportunity and the correct operators. Trapp is unquestionably, for me, the one piece that Berhalter has to have for this to work like he wants. For whatever Berhalter gained from his quiet moments under Bruce Arena, his real crowded hour was at Hammarby, where he developed the base to become MLS’s first truly American-European coaching innovator.

This is so typically Berhalter, this average position map. Split the center backs wide, push your fullbacks and fold Trapp into the deep places of the midfield. Trapp would appear even deeper if his motor (he is American, after all) did not naturally drive him forward more often.

It is as though Berhalter is encouraging all of America that we can do this. That Trapp can do this. Whether you have any reason to believe he’ll be given a real chance to play his particular style on the national team scene is another matter for another time, perhaps.

Trapp is of course imperfect as a player, a product of a youth system that would have him play one way, before his time in Columbus, through vigorous repetition and repeated first team opportunity, has molded him into something uniquely other than. Defensively he can be weak, although this is subtly changing (Clint Dempsey knows this as well as anyone). He can be better on recovery. With Trapp, you will need to devote yourself to possession and probably deploy another defensive midfielder to cover the patches Trapp does not.

But all of these are largely physical traits, something we have weighted far too heavily down the years. Men like Berhalter are shifting the focus of the discussion away from those things, so that the oddity of Bradley’s deployment over the past three years becomes more of a cautionary tale we tell our children rather than a story that is being continually weaved throughout our lives.

The point though, or the thing that Trapp has taught us, is that the U.S. has its next evolutionary chain on its Darwinian chart of slowly morphing deep central midfielders. What we didn’t know until now was that Bradley was the link mid-evolution. He was not quite as heavy-footed as Kyle Beckerman and not quite as creatively and distributively inclined as Wil Trapp. So we miscast him until he was playing all the parts.

That cannot happen with Trapp. He must be allowed to develop as he has been. Because if his progression is allowed to continue unabated and he is not shoehorned into some rumor of an antiquated role unfit for his skill set, we will be talking about Trapp as the American answer to the game’s unabated modern march forward.