Abby Wambach is to U.S. women’s soccer what Mick Jagger is to the Rolling Stones: Take them out of the mix, and it’s hardly a functioning unit.

Wambach means more to her team than any athlete on any significant sports franchise anywhere. She is that good, and the rest of her teammates are that ordinary.

Which makes Wambach’s awful injury Wednesday night in San Diego (both the main bones in her lower leg were fractured) probably a death blow for the U.S. women’s hopes for Olympic gold in Beijing next month.

Someone will take her place in the lineup; no one will actually replace her.

I’m trying to come up with an athlete who means as much to his or her team. And having a very difficult time with it.

Albert Pujols and the St. Louis Cardinals, maybe? Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts? Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers?

Michael Jordan and the Bulls, once upon a time. That may be the most apt comparison to Wambach and U.S. soccer.

Wambach is the source of most of the U.S. women’s offense. If not scoring (10 goals this year) she is assisting (13, this year). At all times, she is the beast with whom the opposition must contend. The one woman who frightens every team everywhere.

Wambach is amazingly agile and fast considering she almost always is the biggest woman on the pitch. She is listed at 5-foot-11. Her weight is not given by the U.S. Soccer Federation (a routine omission that reflects lingering weirdness about women’s weights, even among elite athletes), but it has to be close to 200 pounds. She was going to be the bull in the China tournament, as she always is. Someone who strikes fear into the opposition when she takes the field.

Soccer pioneer Michelle Akers was a strapping woman, and a critical player for the U.S. team in the 1990s, but she had more help around her than does Wambach. Akers had Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Christine Lilly, etc.

Wambach’s helpers come and go and often are erratic.

Consider these statistic from the 2008 national team player pool:

Wambach has 99 goals in 127 appearances with the national team. A rate of .78 goals per game.

That puts her miles ahead of the next most productive scorers with any significant national-team significance. Natasha Kai, at .38 goals per appearance (20 in 52 games) and Carli Lloyd, at .27 goals per game (17 in 64) are the distant second and third in scoring proficiency.

And even those statistics may be a little misleading. We also can safely surmise that goals by anyone who isn’t Wambach were likely to have been scored in blowouts over inferior teams … games in which Wambach left early or perhaps didn’t even play. Games of the sort that her likely replacement, UCLA junior Lauren Cheney, has spent most of her limited international career in.

To lose Wambach for the Olympics is a disaster. Especially for the women’s side of U.S. soccer, which has no meaningful club system to sustain interest in the sport between big events. The women have their World Cup the year before each Summer Games, and then they have the Olympics, which is essentially just as big as the World Cup … and then it’s two years of, basically, nothing.

Hard to imagine the U.S. team winning gold without her.