Seven years later, it's time for reflection and goodbyes

No one comes to LAX unless they have a good reason to, you know, like propose to your fiancée as she steps off a plane from Kazakhstan or depart with a lottery jackpot for a new life in St. Bart's, never to look back.

On the day I landed from England and arrived in the United States for a new job as Yahoo Sports' soccer writer seven summers ago, I met people doing both, and in the intervening years I have often wondered what became of them.

It is easy to picture the star-crossed lovers (she said yes) still locked in marital bliss and the lucky new millionaire still sipping rum punches on a beach. But you just never know.

After all, as I landed in Tinseltown and, happily ignorant of the traffic terror that awaited, prepared to launch myself into the city, I had no idea of what the coming years would hold.

As I ready to embark upon a new position with a different publication and leave the place that has been my working home since that day – seven years older, grayer, fractionally wiser in some ways and prone as ever to foolishness in others – now is the time for enjoyable reflection.

Indeed, time in itself is a confounding thing. It tricks our minds enough to make you wonder where all the years have gone yet marvel at how you managed to fit so much into them.

Sports writing is a special privilege and combined, as it was in my case, with a life-altering relocation to a different part of the world, offered the unique kind of joy of being able to mix love with love.

I fell in love more often in these past years than in the rest of my life combined. Not only did I meet my wife in California, but I fell deep for America, its people, its optimism, its opportunities and yes, its multitude of flaws.

And, both professionally and personally, I fell for American soccer, for the youth and bravery and beat-upon nature of it. Stateside soccer is still not to everyone's taste, and that is not only just fine but also quite understandable.

Those who grew up in America see the national team take on countries like Belgium, with a smaller population and regionalized economy, and are embarrassed at defeat. Yet I will always see the U.S. soccer team as a perennial underdog, being old enough to remember watching it flounder at the 1990 World Cup and marvel at the progress since, development that continues before our eyes, steady enough to go unnoticed until we pause to breathe and reflect.

And that is what I am doing now, remembering 2007 and sitting at L.A. Galaxy games shaking my head as a stadium full of spectators, not fans, spectators, would cheer when the PA announcer called out David Beckham's name … because he had just been yellow-carded. They didn't really know what they were hollering for, and honestly, probably didn't quite know why they were there, except that it was the cool new thing and Beckham had impossibly perfect hair and a pop star wife.

How things are different now. The crowds are still by no means huge, but they are sophisticated in their knowledge and understanding, especially the traveling hordes like those who went to the World Cup this summer.

The American Outlaws are a little brash and boisterous for some, but I cherish them and their loyalty dearly and wish I could trade my seat in the press box and leap and chant and roar along with them.

How about that – a Brit dreaming enviously of being an American soccer fan?

But they are part of it, part of the movement, like everyone along the way – the hardy souls who played in Major League Soccer for $12,000 a season and even the confused early fans. Beckham, too.

The English midfielder didn't change American soccer in the totally unrealistic way some expected but he did make an impact and imprint and paved the way for other stars who have streamed in since. Far more importantly to me, he unwittingly flipped the very course of my life.

If not for him and his move to L.A., Yahoo probably wouldn't have been looking for a soccer writer in mid-2007, and almost certainly not a British one. And becoming Yahoo's soccer writer wouldn't have led to me becoming an Olympics writer or a Super Bowl writer, or covering championship fights in Las Vegas, or meeting my wife, upturning my life, and starting afresh, all while keeping my accent.

One of the true beauties of the job I have been proud to call my own these past heady years was its intrinsically varied nature, from World Cups and Olympics both summer and winter, to chasing stories across five continents and a mountain of air miles gone begging (oh, why didn't I sign up sooner?).

It took me to trackside for Usain Bolt's trifectas in Beijing and London to a Tiger Woods collapse and a Serena Williams meltdown. I've seen shrieks of joy and tears of anguish, sometimes from just a few feet away in locker rooms or interview zones, from characters as diverse as Tom Brady and Johnny Weir and Manny Pacquiao and Gabby Douglas and Lionel Messi.

And, of course, eternal moments like Landon Donovan's late winner against Algeria in 2010, a parcel of time seminal both for the sport in this country and for me, as I realized in a split second of elation that I cared about this, not because it was a great story but because America's team had somehow snared my heart, too.

The job was a joy for its excitement and its rollicking fun, from visiting beautiful locations in the name of the beautiful game, to trying out with gorgeous cheerleaders or figuring which sport was best to take a date.

There were times when it put a smile on my face so wide my jaw ached and others when my soul fell through the floor. Yet sometimes it was those fraught tales that brought the greatest sense of fulfillment and belief in human nature.

When I met a heart-breakingly brave Russian mother who had lost a child to terrorists tell her story midway through 2013, I had no comprehension of what such a loss could be like. Some months later, I found out, when my baby daughter Sophia passed away the day after she was born.

Tragedy doesn't have to define your life, but it is impossible not to be rewired by it. I was once carefree and sometimes uncaring, eternally optimistic and feeling that I had been touched by fortune. That is no longer the case. Faith that everything will just turn out all right can never be replaced once it has been shattered.

I swore not to lazily use such hyperbolic words like "disaster" and "tragedy" to describe sporting events ever again, and I think, despite maybe a couple of slips, I have stuck to it.

The secret to loving this job even through all your life's personal phases is to understand that we writers don't influence the game. We record it and document it and tell its story, bringing out its color to those who follow from home.

Best of all, it changes us. The day when I am no longer inspired by the athletic feats I see or moved by the courage and the struggle will be a sad day, and I hope I hang up my laptop, or my FuturePadXV400, long before then.

The athletes are both special and normal. Every one of them, from the global superstar and endorsement-laden billionaire to an MLS journeyman or a last-place Olympic no-hoper, possesses something inner, a competitive fire that sets them apart from the rest of us.

Yet getting journalistic access to see them at close quarters makes you realize that in every other way they are just as human as the person in the street. They might not be stressing about the mortgage payments (unless they're an Olympian, in which case they probably are), but everyone has fights and fallings out, tribulations and, sometimes, personal loss.

While getting to cover and getting to know famous athletes is a perk, more than anything this job makes you appreciate those who touched your own life. Which is why, for me, it means less that I got to meet Drew Brees or Cristiano Ronaldo or Alex Morgan than that I worked shoulder to shoulder at major events with supremely talented colleagues who happen to be even better people, like Dan Wetzel, Eric Adelson, Kevin Iole and Alan Springer.

Behind their words and pictures, Yahoo has priceless people I am proud to know, like Joe Lago and Johnny Ludden and many others.

Preparing now for a new challenge, the fact that this is the right time for me to move on in no way diminishes the appreciation for my time at Yahoo, for the friendship and the kindness of dear colleagues both past and present. Unlike real sports, journalism doesn't come with a scorecard and the best way to keep tabs is the friends you make along the way. As for the writing, that always has to be for you to judge, the readers, the ones who all this is really for.

Thank you sincerely to all who read, who liked, who didn't, who retweeted or rebutted. It is not an exact science and you can't please all the people any of the time, or even one person all the time.

Heck, it is not even a science at all. It is just sports. It is everything and nothing and whatever you make of it. It makes us feel happy and sad and every emotion magnified through a lens of competition. The writer and the reader share a common thread; unlike the athlete we don't live in sports. We live through them.

To varying degrees this is who we are, and what we want to be.