EAST HARTFORD, Conn. — U.S. Soccer approached the gray-haired coach with a favor to ask.

The federation had just parted ways with Bruce Arena as coach of the men’s national team, and while it searched for his replacement, there were training camps to be run, players to be coached and games to be played. Could you help us through this rough patch, Arena’s longtime assistant was asked, and run the ship while we navigate the transition?

Yes, the assistant had replied. A proud company man, of course he would do it.

But soon the search for Arena’s replacement stalled, months passed, and some of the new players the coach had brought in started to look like keepers. The results weren’t bad, either. And that is how, in May 2007, Bob Bradley went from caretaker manager to coach of the United States national team.

Eleven years later, almost no one expects Dave Sarachan — the right-hand man on the Arena coaching staff that oversaw last year’s World Cup qualifying debacle, and the man currently managing that team’s reconstruction — to follow Bradley’s path to the top job. But, a year after a loss at Trinidad and Tobago brought U.S. Soccer’s world crashing down, here he remains as the coach: a symbol of the old leadership guiding the next generation of top Americans through their first few steps as international players.

On Tuesday, Sarachan, who was hired to oversee one game, will lead the United States against Peru for its 10th under his unlikely watch. That he will be there at all will be viewed by some as an indictment of U.S. Soccer’s ability to reform itself after its darkest hour, to emerge from a year of anger, disappointment and upheaval with new faces and new ideas.