The USWNT has moved on from Alex Morgan. They are in the Olympic finals as a result

LYON, France — Here, at 8 p.m. Tuesday, was the moment that might have been Alex Morgan. This, an Olympic semifinal, was the stage where her vast experience would have been appreciated. The U.S. women’s national team was sputtering scoreless in overtime of a second straight knockout round. Most soccer coaches, fond of conventional wisdom, would have resorted to their veteran striker coming off the bench.

But not .

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She handed the offensive keys to Sophia Smith, Trinity Rodman and Mallory Swanson, who have rewarded their new coach’s faith.

They are, at last, the front three of the future and the present. They have been empowered by Hayes, who, after years of battling Morgan and others for playing time. Swanson was injured for most of last year; Smith was pushed to the left wing so Morgan could play centrally; she and Rodman, in a rigid system that denied them freedom and individual expression.

Now that Morgan is out of the picture and no longer on the Olympic roster, they are liberated.

Hayes, Rodman said, “wants us to thrive in the way that we’ve always thrived. And I think that’s something that she carries into her coaching style: She doesn’t want to change anybody’s style. She wants everybody to be creative in their own way. And she allows that to happen while also trying to inject her structure and her principles into it, sprinkle them throughout. But letting us play freely has been extremely successful.”

The first step, however, was to simply let them play. Before Hayes’ long-awaited arrival in late May, the three never started a game together. Swanson (née Pugh) had fallen to the fringes of the USWNT roster in her early 20s. When she resurfaced around the same time, then-USWNT coach Vlatko Andonovski never gave the three a chance to come together — as he was fixated on starting Morgan as a traditional No. 9 (perhaps as a temporary replacement for the injured Catarina Macario).

So he pushed Smith to the left flank — while she tore up the National Women’s Soccer League as a striker. He put Swanson on the right; then Rodman replaced her, and Lynn Williams briefly replaced a struggling Rodman at the World Cup, where Morgan, a USWNT legend, had seemingly forgotten how to score.

But she was still Alex Morgan. After being off the roster this winter, she returned as an injury replacement, and . Her skills at the end of her career, as a selfless forward, were still unmatched. She .

Hayes, however, had a different view.

“It was a tough decision, especially given Alex’s record and history with this team,” she said when naming the team. “I felt like I wanted to go in a different direction and selected different players.”

She wanted to trust Swanson, 26, and Smith, 23, and Rodman, 22, with transforming the USWNT. She wanted to build around speed and 1-v-1 prowess, around dynamism and interchangeability and grit. And they .

She’s started the SSR Trident in eight of her nine games at the helm — all except a mostly B-team friendly against South Korea. It took them a while to find their feet, but they’ve been excellent here in France. They’re “dynamic as hell,” Hayes said. They’ve scored nine of the USWNT’s 11 Olympic goals. ; Swanson and Smith then .

“They’re like the Big Three,” midfielder Sam Coffey, “but they’re all Michael Jordan.”

As a new trio, they’re looking for a nickname. “I think something simple is good,” Smith said. who called them “The Holy Trinity” — but that doesn’t work, since it’s her given name. Christen Press, a former USWNT star, came up with “Triple Trouble,” and Smith likes it. Swanson sounded surprised at first, but when she heard the source, she said, “Then yeah. If Press said it, sure.”

Her word to describe playing with Smith and Rodman, however, was even simpler: “Fun.”

Smith agreed: “I mean, it’s so much fun.”

They’ve all played with a joy that was conspicuously and painfully absent last summer in New Zealand. Swanson attributed it to “the fluidity between all the players in the forward line, the midfield,” which is “super special.” It’s a departure from the Andonovski days, when Morgan always played through the middle and Smith almost always left of center or wide left. Now, under Hayes, the USWNT has often settled on a 3-1-4-2 formation, with Smith and Swanson up front, Rose Lavelle playing off them and Rodman wide right — but none of that is set in stone.

“We’re all so dynamic,” Smith said. “We all love to play a similar game. And we love to go in transition, but we’re also learning that we can make plays, possess the ball and combine.”

Smith, in particular, “has just gone to another level in this tournament,” as Hayes said; and part of the reason is her positioning. “I like playing the 9. That’s what I’ve been playing in Portland. That’s where I feel really comfortable,” Smith said. But then she added: “With our front three, we can all play anywhere. … Mal can play the 9, I can go wide, Trin can — I mean, we can all go anywhere. I think that’s what makes us so special. And that’s what makes us so hard to defend.”

They will surely start again in Saturday’s gold-medal final against Brazil. They are the primary reason the USWNT looks very different from 12 months ago, when it bowed out of the World Cup earlier than ever before. And the most remarkable thing about the turnaround is that, aside from Swanson-for-Morgan, the players who pulled it off are many of the same players who flopped last summer.

“We have the talent,” Smith said. “We just needed someone to believe in us and put us in the best position to succeed. And Emma does just that.”

“And this team is so special,” Smith also said. “We’re young. And we just find ways to win games. We don’t have the most experience in the world, but that doesn’t matter. Because we work for each other.”