VANCOUVER – Soccer-ed out now? Or, has your appetite just been whetted by how this country rallied behind the semi-successful run of Canada’s plucky women’s team at the FIFA World Cup and by Sunday’s superb final at BC Place?

If it’s the latter and you haven’t totally given up on Canada’s often-derided men’s team, you’re in luck. All but ignored since its humiliating 8-1 loss to Honduras in qualifying for the 2014 World Cup, the men will try to grab a sliver of the spotlight in this month’s CONCACAF Gold Cup.

“The support the country showed for the women throughout the World Cup was really amazing,” Russell Teibert, a Whitecaps midfielder, said Monday from the national team’s staging camp in Torrance, Calif. “We want that as well. Hopefully we can give Canadian fans something to cheer about.”

For the first time, games in the biennial tournament will be played outside the U.S. and Mexico, with a group stage double-header scheduled for next Tuesday at BMO Field in Toronto. All games will be carried live on various Sportsnet channels.

The 12-country competition, which Canada shockingly won in 2000 but bowed out of in 2013 with nary a win or a goal, begins Tuesday with the opening group stage games. Costa Rica, coming off its surprising run to the World Cup quarterfinals last summer, the U.S. and Mexico are the favorites.

Canada, which meets El Salvador in Carson, Calif., on Wednesday, is currently 109th in the FIFA rankings, the lowest-ranked of the competing countries.

But head coach Benito Floro’s men enter the tournament on a modest four-game winning streak. They’re 5-2-2 over their last nine, including a 3-1 exhibition win last September over Jamaica, one of the countries in their Gold Cup group.

“It is true that good results will always help,” Floro said when the Canadian roster was unveiled last month. “But now we are going to play against those teams that are higher-ranked than us, so we need to show that we are growing and developing against those teams and show that we are doing things in the right way.”

Most of Canada’s games over the last year were friendlies, played in relative anonymity in Panama, Puerto Rico, Orlando, Fla., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

If the Canada men – 10 of whom are with MLS clubs – are to become relevant again, a run to at least the Gold Cup semifinals ahead of qualifying games later this summer for the 2018 World Cup is crucial.

It won’t be easy, even with those potentially winnable group stage games against El Salvador and Jamaica. Costa Rica is the fourth country in the group.

Influential midfielder Atiba Hutchinson, who plays club soccer in Turkey, is not available because of a nagging groin injury, while No. 1 goalkeeper Milan Borjan has elected to stay with his Bulgarian club side Ludogorets Razgrad, which has UEFA Champions League qualifiers in July.

Midfielder Will Johnson, who recently returned to the Portland Timbers lineup after a long layoff due to a broken leg, also won’t play, primarily because of the condensed schedule and crazy travel, which sees Canada go from California to Houston to Toronto for its group stage games.

“I asked to stay back,” Johnson told reporters in Portland. “There’s three games in eight days with a stupid amount of travel. For a guy coming off an injury . . . it just didn’t make sense for me.”

Floro, however, has painstakingly rebuilt a Canadian squad that was in tatters. There’s more structure and better organization. And in young forwards, Cyle Larin and Tesho Akindele, he’s got a couple of the kind of mobile, exciting goal scorers Canada has lacked for some time.

For those who weren’t keeping count, Canada actually went 15 months over late 2012 and 2013 without scoring a goal. It was nine matches and more than 900 minutes.

Akindele was the MLS rookie of the year last season with FC Dallas, while the 20-year-old Larin was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2015 MLS SuperDraft by Orlando City.

The Brampton., Ont., native has six goals in 13 appearances with Orlando this season and scored in each of Canada’s World Cup qualifying wins over Dominica last month.

Canada also has some capable young midfielders in Teibert, who scored on a penalty in the 2-0 win in Dominica, fast-improving Jonathan Osorio of Toronto FC, Maxime Tissot of the Montreal Impact and Samuel Piette, who plays for Deportivo la Coruna in Spain.

Teibert said not having two experienced players like Hutchinson and Johnson “is obviously a loss. But we’ve got some young players who can step in and do a job."

“This team is in a good place right now. The team has bonded a lot more since we’ve been in camp, a lot of laughing and everything. There’s a real good feeling on and off the pitch.”

The reigning champion U.S., riding high after recent friendly wins over Germany and the Netherlands, has several MLS players on its roster, including Michael Bradley and Jozy Altidore of Toronto FC, the Seattle Sounders’ Clint Dempsey and Kyle Beckerman of Real Salt Lake.

The Americans opens tonight against Honduras in Dallas.

gkingston@vancouversun.com