Time & Perspective Quote by Lorrie Fair

There’s a quiet double-take built into Lorrie Fair’s line: they expected “big,” but not this. The first clause is the language of planning meetings and press packets - “scheduled,” “history,” the kind of official optimism women’s sports are often forced to justify in advance. Then she pivots to something more raw: “we didn’t ever fathom.” That word choice matters. It admits that even the people inside the movement had been trained by scarcity. You can believe in progress and still have your imagination capped by years of half-filled stands, thin coverage, and the constant cultural hint that women’s games are a niche product.

The subtext is less celebration than recalibration. Sold-out stadiums “all over the country” isn’t just a metric; it’s a rebuke to the old excuses. Not enough demand. Not marketable. Not profitable. Fair’s surprise exposes how those narratives didn’t merely live in boardrooms - they seeped into athletes’ expectations, too. When the crowds actually arrive, the emotional punch is partly joy, partly disbelief, and partly the realization that the gatekeepers were never accurately measuring the audience; they were measuring their own willingness to invest.

Contextually, Fair is speaking from the generation that helped build modern U.S. women’s soccer and watched it flip from underfunded upstart to national event. The quote works because it captures the moment a sport stops asking for permission and starts taking up space - loudly, visibly, and repetitively, city after city.