IRVINE, Calif. — Nearly a decade and a half ago, two 13-year-old boys stood on the eighth level of a stairwell at a California hotel tossing wads of chewed gum, trying to get it to stick to the fronds of a palm tree below.

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The kids — one from Texas, the other from Pennsylvania — had just met on the bus taking them to a U.S. under-14 training camp, a random happenstance of choosing a seat one row in front of the other. Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie couldn’t have imagined that 14 years later, they would walk together onto the field of a stadium just a few miles away from that hotel, leading their country into a home World Cup.

The U.S. men’s national team will open its tournament today at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. It will carry with it a pressure and expectation foreign to most U.S. men’s teams. This group has been called a golden generation, one expected to deliver a deep run in the World Cup even despite the program’s history of only ever having won one knockout game since 1990. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play in front of home crowds and galvanize an entire nation behind the sport.

The U.S. team has accepted those expectations without fear, in part because the fibers that run through the group began forming more than a decade ago, when they were just kids dreaming together that they might get a chance to do exactly this.

“It helps, it just gives you that extra level of comfort,” Pulisic said on Thursday. “You want to fight for guys like that. I played with some of these guys for so long, you don’t want to let them down. You want to give them everything, you want to have their back always. And I think that pushes you through in tough times.”

In order to understand this U.S. men’s national team, you have to understand that it isn’t just a group put together over the last two years by Mauricio Pochettino or even over the last nine since the failure to reach the 2018 World Cup in Russia. It is a group in which many of the core players have grown up together, from proms and pro debuts to marriages, kids, trophies and record transfers. They have experienced firsts together — national team debuts and World Cups — and gone through lows together — bad loans at clubs, Copa América failure and coach firings.

There were four players in that under-14 identification camp in 2012 that are now playing for the U.S. in this home World Cup — Pulisic, McKennie, Haji Wright and Alejandro Zendejas. A few months later, another ID camp was held for the same age group, this time including a winger from Queens, N.Y., named Timothy Weah and a kid from Wappingers Falls, N.Y., named Tyler Adams.

Three years later, Wright, Pulisic, Zendejas, Adams and Auston Trusty would play together in a FIFA Under-17 World Cup. Others would join as time rolled forward. A 17-year-old left back named Antonee Robinson from Milton Keynes, England, in 2014. A 16-year-old Dutch-American named Sergiño Dest at a U-17 camp in 2016. A 17-year-old center back from Birmingham, Ala., named Chris Richards at an ID camp in 2018.

There are connections like that everywhere, from Joe Scally and Gio Reyna playing together as youngsters in New York, to Mark McKenzie and Brenden Aaronson, who have known each other since they were 10 and 11 years old at the Philadelphia Union academy.

Just the other day at the team hotel, as they prepared for their World Cup opener, Wright and Trusty scrolled through their phones together, “looking at pictures together from 2014 when we were kids,” Wright said, and marveling at the fact that they were sharing this World Cup together.

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“It’s definitely an amazing experience to have been able to go through all that with a lot of my teammates,” Wright said. “I’m happy that we were able to make those experiences and memories and able to bring them onto the field now.”

If there is going to be a strength of this team, it will be found there, in those relationships and experiences and the trust it built up within the group. It will be the thing the U.S. falls back on when it’s up against tough times in this tournament, whether in Friday’s opener against Paraguay or down the road against Australia or Turkey.

“From the inside I think we all understand that we have a group that’s very tight-knit, a group that’s been through a lot, a group that goes back,” McKenzie said. “That unity and resilience is ultimately what’s gotten us here.”

Pochettino is undoubtedly now trying to tap into that, and to empower the new faces to complement those longer-held bonds. Players like Alex Freeman and Matt Freese, who only made their national-team debuts last year, and Malik Tillman and Folarin Balogun, who joined in 2022 and 2023, respectively. All four are expected to be in the starting XI.

The goal has to be that those players strengthen the well-established connections.

That it reinforces the bonds around which so much expectation has been built.

In his introduction to the team, Pochettino stressed that there are “only 26 of us” in the group and “we have the opportunity to go out there and make history, make everyone proud,” Balogun said last month. “He said that won’t be possible unless you guys are together.”

That should not be an issue for a team that has mostly known no other way, a group of guys who find the best respite in each other, in friends who knew them “before” and have gone through everything with them since.

“It’s special, and I think these are kind of the moments that you really need to stay present within it all, because no matter the circumstances, and no matter what happens, you’re going through it with your best friends,” Adams said.

“That connection and that chemistry and that bond is what has allowed us to grow over the past four years, especially. Since Qatar, obviously the roster has changed, you get more fresh faces in, (it) adds a little bit of a different energy and vibe, but the connection hasn’t wavered, and I think that’s the most important thing.”

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This article originally appeared in The Athletic.