The world has changed quite a bit for all of us in the past three years. For few of us more than Alyssa Naeher.

In 2019, she wins a World Cup as the starting goalkeeper for the United States.

In 2020, along with the rest of us, she endures a pandemic unprecedented in our lifetimes.

In 2021, she plays in her first Olympics, five years after being an unused sub behind Hope Solo.

There is a scratch on one of the walls in my apartment I’ve been meaning to patch for three years. Naeher, on the other hands, watched her whole life change in that span. The latest entry was Friday’s penalty shootout against the Netherlands. Her two saves — including the stop against the seemingly unstoppable Vivianne Miedema — helped the U.S. reach the semifinals.

Watching the drama unfold over a cup of coffee in the still-breakfast hours stateside, I couldn’t help but think back to something she said during the team’s training camp back in 2018. It was a lengthy interview, but Naeher in my experience was always very (understandably) careful to say only as much as she wanted to say. She wasn’t going to take a question and stroll off on a five-minute stream-of-consciousness digression about her inner thoughts and aspirations.

Yet if hardly revelatory (I don’t remember if it even made it into the profile, but I don’t think it did), one answer struck me as a glimpse into her real self. Not revelatory, just transparent.

“Something that I found that was helpful in all the chaos of being on the move was if I could at least start my day the same way, then it would give me some semblance of normalcy,” Naeher said that day in Manhattan Beach. “For me that became waking up, having some quiet time, grabbing a coffee, doing a crossword, reading a book — just having that quiet time to myself in the morning, I can do that anywhere and that starts my day.”

Maybe it just resonated because it felt familiar. The first cup (or three) of coffee in the morning is life at its most peaceful. I don’t like waking up when it’s still dark outside, but I love being awake while the rest of the world snoozes. The subsequent chaos these days is created by email and Slack, rather than the decidedly more intense competition, travel and training that Naeher talked about. Still, the sentiment is the same.

Maybe extroverts feel this way, but it feels more like a refuge of the introvert.

“She knows herself very well,” Julie Ertz said of Naeher back then. “She’s very introverted but is an extrovert at the same time. She enjoys her alone time and she’s huge in crossword puzzles and very intelligent and smart, but has a huge heart and cares for everyone.”

The temptation to contrast 2016 and 2021 is tempting. Two quarterfinal shootouts, one in a mostly empty stadium in Brasilia and the other in a necessarily empty stadium in Japan. Two very different personalities in goal making two very different sort of headlines in the end.

At the same time, Solo had less to do with the U.S. exit that day in Brasilia than Naeher did with U.S. survival in this game. Solo’s infamous comments after that game against Sweden were inelegant, but I never really felt they were damning. They were just the final piece of a much bigger puzzle. Yet speaking purely about performance, Solo’s personality served her extraordinarily well. It served the national team extraordinarily well for a long time.

Just as Naeher, whether or not she wins universal acclaim as starter or keeps her spot through the next cycle, has now served this team quite well through three-plus challenging years.

Good for her.

I’d like to think she started her Friday with a coffee and crossword in Japan.

Better yet, I’d like to think she will again Saturday morning.

She will have a lot to do tomorrow. There are two more games to play, in part thanks to her.

But for those who savor silence and smell of coffee, morning routines are sacred.