COMMERCE CITY – When Captain America went down with an ugly thud on the soccer pitch, his countrymen desperately needed a new hero to step up.

Can Haji Wright become the feel-good Ted Lasso story that the U.S. men’s team has been itching to tell?

With U.S. superstar Christian Pulisic nursing yet another injury, Wright scored both goals Tuesday night in Team USA’s 2-1 victory in a World Cup tuneup against Australia, slotted at No. 25 in last month’s FIFA world rankings.

“There’s always pressure,” Haji said. “Throughout the national team, there’s great players on the pitch. When I get my chance, I want to go out there and show what I can do.”

Haji is neither a new kid on the block nor an unfamiliar face to the USMNT. He scored against the Netherlands at the World Cup in 2022. But like this purported golden generation of American soccer, it’s starting to get late for Haji to seize his moment. At age 27, he had scored only five goals for Team USA in his career before suiting up against Australia.

With the clock ticking loudly toward next year’s World Cup, which opens in 239 short days on American soil, the U.S. team led by Mauricio Pochettino has been frantically searching for something, anything, to build a foundation of hope.

“The moment that we identified the problems,” Pochettino recently said, “we started to destroy the things that we need to destroy and started to build the house from the ground up.”

Any knucklehead can tear the whole thing down.

Since September 2024, when he was named coach of the U.S. team, Pochettino has often looked like a bewildered dude holding broken innards of a toilet in the plumbing aisle of your corner Ace store on a weekend morning, hoping a helpful hardware man will wander by and tell him how the pieces fit.

Little has come together for Pochettino in the past 13 months, and it probably won’t unless Pulisic, who has been battling a chronic ankle injury for what seems like forever and a day, gets 100 percent fit.

The good news: Pulisic was healthy enough to join the starting lineup against Australia.

The bad news? The Socceroos socked it to him repeatedly. They hammered Pulisic to the ground twice in the match’s opening 26 minutes, forcing him to the sideline.

“It was disappointing to see him leave with a hamstring injury,” said U.S. midfielder Cristian Roldan, who realizes how essential it is for a hale and hardy Pulisic “to get to the World Cup in a good spot.”

As Pulisic pulled on a puffy coat and walked slowly off the pitch, leaving behind teammates that were already facing an early 1-0 deficit, hope seemed to go with him.

But at almost the precise moment when the player so key to this country’s soccer aspirations that he’s called Captain America hit the locker room, a hero stepped out of the growing shadows for Team USA.

Wright, enjoying a breakout season with eight goals in nine games for second-division club Coventry City across the pond in jolly old England, is being given a look at striker.

And Wright struck a rocket shot that tied the match at 1-1 in the 33rd minute.

It infused a crowd of 18,218 red,white and blue fans so subdued they  bordered on apathy to life, with chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” rocking the stadium.

“I am pleased,” said Pochettino, who griped about a thermometer dipping down to the 50s in Colorado’s thin air having an adverse effect on his players’ health. “But I wanted to see more.”

With renewed bounce in their boots, the U.S. men pushed the go-ahead goal past Aussie keeper Mathew Ryan only six minutes deep into the second half. Wright struck again, with a wicked crossover move that did Allen Iverson proud and broke the ankles of a defender before he slammed the ball in the lower left corner of the frame.

With the World Cup chasing the television money, the tournament field has been expanded to 48 teams, with 32 of the participants making the more-the-merrier knockout rounds.

On its home soil, will 2026 finally be the year the USMNT grows into a legit soccer power the world must finally take seriously?

What this team must gain in the eight months remaining to the World Cup is something Lasso likes to preach: belief.

“It’s not a coincidence,” Pochettino said, “to have this capacity to believe and really to say we trust in ourselves. That must be in our mind … in our heart, in our blood.”