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One Goal – A Coach, A Team and the Game that Brought A Divided Town Together – Amy Bass (Hachette Books)

There is a tired old cliché about sports being a metaphor for life. Like almost all old clichés, they become clichés because they tend to be true. Some of the greatest moments in sports don’t occur during the game itself, but often after the game or off the field. Sports can divide us in the case of rivalries and can unite us in many cases, probably most vividly the so-called Miracle on Ice, the 1980 U.S. gold medal hockey team.

It is the commonality and the community of sports that can best impact the social fabric of our society and break down real or imagined barriers of race, class and background. Amy Bass does a wonderful job of focusing on that commonality in the new book, One Goal, that tells the tale of a group of Somali immigrants and the small town of Lewistown, Maine.

Lewistown, while it sits in a northeast coastal state has a sense of small town, middle America about it that sits at the center of the story of how the town and the team came together to unite around the pursuit of their first statewide soccer championship. With so much national focus, often misunderstood or mischaracterized by the media on President Trump’s approach to national security and immigration, this story could have easily drifted off into ridiculous social commentary. Bass manages to walk a fine line and focus on what matters in this story.

Some say it characterizes how America should work and I can’t disagree; America and American immigration works best when immigrants work to integrate into our society and add to the social fabric rather than try to pull on loose threads. One Goal is a triumphant tale that you could dub soccer’s Friday Night Lights.