The recent FIFA Women's World Cup finals got me contemplating four-year intervals. A lot can happen in four years: politically, personally, and otherwise. Think: presidential elections, undergraduate graduations, Taylor Swift world tours, the list goes on. But all too often we consider these independent of one another.

Sunday's championship game got me thinking about the summer of 2015, when my seventeen-year-old self was getting ready to start her senior year at her small public high school – college still a somewhat distant prospect, far more exciting than it was nerve-racking, and Donald Trump's election bid still more comical than it was realistic. The past four years have been drastically transformative for me … and for our country. The constant factor? Seems to be the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team.

They won then, and (spoiler!) they won now. The difference, for me anyway, is that now, I appreciate the win as something greater than an athletic feat. Greater even than an American feat. Of course, this is not to understate those aspects, because I cannot even begin to comprehend the training and conditioning and strategy that made all their wins possible – and the seasonal timing of the tournament bolstered our women with patriotic undercurrents to every goal scored. But these are all realities that existed, not unbeknownst to me, four years ago.

This summer, I watched the tournament — okay, I caught highlights and Instagram updates from the tournament — through the empowering lens of fourth-wave feminism. Captain Megan Rapinoe represented not only American leadership and purple hair dye, but political activism and female resilience. Captain Alex Morgan defended her tea-sip celebration versus England with poise, but certainly not quietly.

This kind of activism was not lost on my seventeen-year-old self, but I vividly remember commenting on Rapinoe's chic pixie cut far more often than her cultural influence. Undoubtedly, this is a testament to my own teenage ignorance (and certainly not, for example, the team's lack of political impact four years ago), but like I said, these four years have been transformative.

Now, due in (large) part to the classes I've taken and the media to which I've been exposed thus far in my collegiate experience, I am better informed, equipped with knowledge that translates almost directly to outrage. After reading works like Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist and Morgan Jerkins's This Will Be My Undoing, I have a fuller understanding of the systematic sexism that has been plaguing the women I know and love (and the ones I don't) all this time – a better means of expressing the misogynistic undercurrents of our society – more historical backing to comprehend Feminism at large, all of which can be (and has been) applied to the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team.

I'm proud of how far I've come in appreciating the work of these women, again, not just as an American, but as an American woman – even more specifically, as an American woman seeking change. Their win has been inspiring, but the greatest win is yet to come. That win will come with equal pay, with greater acknowledgment, ultimately with respect.

I can only assume based on the resilience and dedication of these women, among others, that the next four years will bring radical equality – the likes of which haven't been seen, the likes of which will illuminate for generations to come the utter travesty in which we have been living.

But I also realize that the statement I have just made — more specifically, the conviction with which I said it — is not a given. It will take work. It will take grit. And frankly, I'm honored to play any role I can in making it happen.

Thank you, U.S. Women's National Soccer Team. If I've learned anything in these four years, it's that you got the ball rolling – pun very much intended. Now it's our turn – all of us – to build off your momentum and get that ultimate W.