She grew up in Rochester, New York, the second youngest of seven children in a large Catholic family, and came to the University of Florida as a player whose physical presence and aerial ability were already exceptional. She was not the fastest player on the field and she did not need to be. She understood space and timing in the penalty area with a precision that made her dangerous from any delivery, at any point in a match, regardless of how long she had been on the field. The national team built its attacking identity around that quality for over a decade, and she delivered consistently enough that the record accumulated without anyone fully processing how far past every previous marker it had gone.

She retired in 2015 and subsequently spoke publicly and with unusual candor about her recovery from alcohol addiction, her identity, and her life after soccer, including in a memoir and in a marriage to author Glennon Doyle in 2017. The honesty she brought to that public accounting matched the directness she had always brought to the penalty area. She scored more international goals than anyone in the history of the sport, won a World Cup, and then spent the years after competing just as hard for something harder to quantify. Both careers are hers.