In the summer of 2001, it was possible to argue that the most accomplished player on any New York professional sports team was 5-foot-2, 130 pounds and female. That was Tiffeny Milbrett, who has just been inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

Milbrett was playing for the Long Island-based New York Power in 2001, the inaugural season of the short-lived Women’s United Soccer Association. A feisty attacker, hiccup-quick, she seemed to persistently materialize at the goalmouth, poised to strike. She constantly called for the ball, not in any discernible language but with what her coach and teammates described as a series of squeaks and shrieks and shouts. “The higher the pitch,” Power teammate Christie Pearce said then, “the more she wants the ball.”

Milbrett was the WUSA’s first MVP, its first author of a hat trick and the first season’s scoring leader, yet spent her career—16 years on the U.S. National team; still sixth on the all-time goal scoring list—yearning for the kind of recognition mostly withheld from her while being lavished on so many of her peers. The Mia Hamms. Julie Foudys. Brandy Chastains.

Which didn’t sit especially well with Milbrett, who had picked up the nickname “No Tact Tiff” during her time at the University of Portland, when her 103 goals equaled Hamm’s then-college record. “I earned that,” she said of the handle. “Because of many, many times having foot in mouth. But a lot of times tact is B.S. The truth hurts.”

With Milbrett, there was no beating around the bush, no sugar-coating, just look-you-in-the-eye talk. “Here I was,” she said, “coming onto the national team and going above and beyond those guys and not getting the respect from my coaches and teammates. It took me way too long to get that respect.”

That was the era when the American women shouldered their way into the public sports consciousness with Olympic and World Cup titles. They stirred the passion of countless young girls—the Ponytail Hooligans—and demanded the attention of Nike’s marketing might.

It was Milbrett who produced the gold-medal winning goal at the ’96 Olympics and who led the team in scoring in the 1999 U.S.-based World Cup—the one more widely remembered for Chastain’s off-with-her-shirt penalty-kick celebration. Milbrett still shares the national team record for most goals in a match—five.

There was a 2000 Olympics first-round match in Melbourne, Australia—a 2-0 victory over Norway—that illustrated the relentless threat of a Milbrett score, even as she went about what amounted to a negative hat trick. Dead-eye shooter that she was, it didn’t seem possible she could hit the goal’s woodwork three times in a game if she tried. But she wasn’t trying, and she did.

After giving the U.S. an early 1-0 lead, Milbrett rattled one shot off the right post, one off the crossbar and one off the left post, then rifled another just wide and nearly knocked over the Norwegian keeper with yet another heavy blow. She had come within inches of a six-goal game.

Still, she noticed back then, “the endorsement world looks for this one spitting image, this person next door, this All-American image. This one. This type.”

Not her. But endorsements come and go. The Hall of Fame is a little piece of immortality. There’s no hurt in that truth.