The beautiful new Marilyn Monroe exhibition here, marking the centenary of her birth, provides a reminder of how other sports, not soccer, have entranced and beguiled this nation through decades. It was baseball’s Joe DiMaggio she married and, after their split, maintained a friendship with until her desperately early death.The Academy Museum shows footage of DiMaggio emerging with Monroe from their registry office wedding and driving off with her in his sports car: two superstars in their pomp. The clamour for the Yankees star is a reminder of how much ground soccer must make up if it is become anything approaching a national obsession in a country where so many other sports crowd in.But what happened in the 4-1 evisceration of Paraguay on Friday night here was so transparently magical that the American nation did not need to appreciate the sport’s finer points to fall in love with it. Part of the narrative in the build-up had been about Mauricio Pochettino watching the 2004 film ‘Miracle’, depicting the US hockey team’s legendary defeat of the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, and there really was something miraculous about what played out.Not the defeat of a benign Paraguay, so much as the brio and self-belief with which the win was accomplished at the end of eight years of immense national expectation of the team. It was freestyle football at times in the emphatic first half as Weston McKennie and Folarin Balogun and Christian Pulisic and Malik Tillman instinctively threaded moves together. Giovanni Reyna’s goal, bent with his outstep, could be on the best-of-tournament reel.Though each had his story, Balogun’s is the most compelling. That of the Brooklyn-born boy who made it to Arsenal’s Hale End academy and could have played for England yet selected the USA - in part because of clamour on social media. There was spatial awareness and ice-cold thought when Balogun scored the US’s third, guiding the ball across the box beyond two defenders and not even casting his eyes up before despatching the ball left-footed into the top left hand corner.