Like many Americans, I've spent the past few days engulfed in the requisite feelings of guilt and shame over my inability to embrace soccer.

Here the World Cup has taken center stage on the international sporting scene and most of us are treating it as nothing more than a mild curiosity, like an especially good tire sale or a nightclub brawl involving Jennifer Lopez and her new paramour.

Tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning, the U.S. team will play Poland in a game that will be televised on ESPN.

Part of me thinks: Dude, this is your chance to get with the rest of the world on this soccer thing. This is your chance to paint your face red-white-and-blue and pound a half-dozen lagers before breakfast and scream "U-S-A! U-S-A!" and "GO-O-O-ALLLLL!" and experience first-hand the excitement of the world's most popular sport.

But another part of me says: Naaah, you should really go to the gym.

And I can tell you this: They won't have the World Cup on at my gym.

No, at that hour, the TV at my gym is controlled by a coterie of gaunt, grim-looking men and women who arise each morning at, I don't know, 3:30 and immediately start barking into their Nokias and pecking at their laptops while simultaneously doing 200 pushups, firing their maids and reading The Wall Street Journal.

These people have no time for soccer.

When they get to the gym for their 40-minute, high-intensity treadmill workout, what they want to watch is the MSNBC business report or something on the Nikkei Index.

Anyway, I also missed the U.S. vs. South Korea on Monday, which ended in a 1-1 tie and which everyone agrees was a terrific match. That one started at 2:30 in the morning, an hour when most of us here on the East Coast are asleep, or are busy with other non-soccer-watching activities such as breaking into cars.

There was a wonderful picture on The Sun's sports section front the other day that showed a smiling woman at a local restaurant watching the U.S.-South Korea match, her arms raised in triumph after a goal by South Korea. If I'd been at that restaurant when they were taking pictures, you would have seen a shot of a fat guy dozing at a rear table in the next day's paper.

Still, I keep waiting for the day when this country will finally embrace soccer - a day that has been predicted now since the Carter administration.

In the late '70s, for instance, I was a young sportswriter who covered the New York Cosmos of the fledgling North American Soccer League (NASL). The Cosmos had all these glamorous international stars like Pele from Brazil and Giorgio Chinaglia from Italy and Franz Beckenbauer from Germany, and they packed Giants Stadium for each game.

Oh, it's just a matter of time before soccer mania is sweeping the country, the experts said. So naturally, a few years later, the fans stopped coming and the NASL folded like a cheap Ozarks circus.

And - poof! - there went the soccer boom.

Then I got married and had kids. Like all suburban kids, my kids played soccer. And pretty soon, I was hearing it again: Oh, boy, when all these soccer-playing kids grow up, they'll be huge fans of the game. And then they'll have soccer-playing kids of their own and the sport will really take off in this country.

But that didn't happen, either.

Oh, the kids liked soccer well enough. But as they got older, they tended to leave the game behind, the way they left behind water wings and braces and teen-age acne.

Believe me, you get a bunch of 20-something American kids in a room, they're not talking about how good North Carolina looked against Indiana in the NCAA soccer finals. No, they're talking about Shaq dropping 40 on the Nets, or which of the Ravens will end up in jail this fall.

Part of the problem with soccer, of course, is that it's too low-scoring.

When I look at a typical European game, with all the chanting and flag-waving in the stands and the players running frantically up and down the field, and then the game ends 1-nil, I think: What is the point of all that?

Maybe if each goal counted for, say, 40 points, I could get excited. A good 120-80 final between France and Senegal, heck, that looks much better on the SportsCenter highlights.

Throw in the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and a couple of furry mascots duking it out on the sidelines and the chance for a lucky fan to win a brand new Chevy Tahoe if he scores a goal from mid-field at halftime and, OK, now you've got something I'm going to watch.

Jesse Ventura doing play-by-play and The Rock doing color commentary - that wouldn't hurt, either.