Philadelphia ? The sports world – particularly that portion outside the United States – paused for about an hour Friday as the groupings for next summer’s soccer World Cup were plucked from a series of bowls on a chilly stage in Leipzig, Germany.

An estimated viewing audience of 320 million in more than 150 countries tuned in for the lottery and for the first clues as to which country might win the 14-inch golden trophy that is the most sought-after sporting prize on earth.

None of this especially matters in Topeka, but it is all true. You can take the Stanley Cup, the Lombardi Trophy, and whatever that baseball thing is with all the flags, roll them together into a gold-plated ball, and their global importance wouldn’t be a fly on the windshield of the World Cup.

Do we as a nation care? No, we do not, even though the U.S. team is a very capable international squad that performed well in 2002. Soccer in the United States, as someone once said, is the sport of the future – and always will be.

But when so many other countries are so passionate, when so much tension and drama are on the line, it is worth tapping into that energy. And, anyway, one look at the World Cup draw and you gain a new appreciation for something like the Bowl Championship Series.

Compared to soccer’s system for seeding and grouping the teams, which changes every four years, even the BCS method of deciding a U.S. college football champion seems reasonable and logical.

This isn’t merely sour grapes since the U.S. team wasn’t given one of the top eight seeds among the 32 World Cup finalists, or since the United States was dumped into a four-team group that includes two powerhouses in Italy and the Czech Republic, along with Ghana.

After Friday’s draw, the odds that the United States would advance as far as it did in 2002 were seriously diminished. Bruce Arena, the national-team coach, said all the right things. He said that to win the World Cup, you have to play tough teams eventually. He said there are never any easy draws regardless of how things might look on paper. His expectations?

“I expect to be playing on a rectangular soccer field,” the laconic Arena said.

In 2002, the United States also wasn’t expected to emerge from group play – two of the four teams advance from each group. Put into a group with a pair of tough European teams, Portugal and Poland, along with a cohost, South Korea, the United States didn’t fold, however. It advanced all the way to the quarterfinals before losing, 1-0, to Germany.

“Trying to figure out which group is strong, which teams are the favorites, it’s a futile exercise,” Arena said. “Our experience in the last World Cup was that, if you prepare and are ready to play, we can compete with any team in the World Cup.”

The U.S. team is getting a lot closer to its goal of joining the elite nations. If it can survive this difficult draw in Germany next summer, soccer fans all over the world will sit up and take notice.

Not that many of them will actually live in the United States, but that takes time as well.