One of my favorite readers alerted me to this one:

A look at Landon Donovan’s last Men’s National Team game, the one against Ecuador.

Wayne Drehs wrote the piece for ESPN The Magazine, and it was posted to the espn.com site today — but I would have missed it entirely, having spent most of the day at 35,000 feet — had I not been told about it.

And how was Landon’s final national team game go?

Pretty much as we expected it would go.

Awkwardly. But with a heartfelt coda.

This was about the October 10 match. When Sunil Gulati, president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, pretty much ordered up a farewell for Landon, in a game versus Ecuador in Hartford, Conn.

Just when Jurgen Klinsmann and Landon thought they were done with each other … there they were, sorta pretending to kinda not to be deeply annoyed by the other.

The story gives more specifics about the behind-the-scenes stuff — like how Gulati ordered a private jet to Los Angeles to pick up Landon and more than a dozen friends and relatives. Like the brief chat Klinsmann had with Landon before the match. A sense of how he was already separate from the team.

And Landon’s emotional break just after leaving the pitch, meeting his mother and sister and girlfriend in the tunnel leading from the field, where tens of thousands of fans chanted “Thank You, Landon” in his 41 minutes of action while wearing the captain’s armband.

He has one more match tomorrow, and that will not be as emotional, not before or during, certainly. For the MLS Cup.

(Should I have changed my travel plans to try to get into the press box for that one? Maybe. Would have been expensive. But I was in L.A. two days before kickoff. Hmmm.)

As much as most U.S. soccer followers, I think I have a grasp of what Donovan has meant to U.S. soccer. Leader in almost every positive metric, led by career goals (57). Same deal with MLS records. He’s collected ’em all.

But the farewell tour has gone on long enough. The tributes have been sufficient. Heartfelt, and deserved, but that’s finished.

Soccer is not a game that lends itself to mid-competition tributes. Not like baseball or football. Basketball, even. The halt in the action changes things too much in soccer, and Landon and his handlers long ago established he will be remembered long after Jurgen Klinsmann (at least the “U.S. coach” part of him) is reduced to a paragraph in a wiki entry.

The Magazine piece sort of hints at some of what comes next, which is more than a little “I’m not sure.”

His agent suggests Landon will be attending a lot of banquets and answering questions about his favorite goal … but I don’t think it’s going that way.

The Landon I know was in his 20s, and he is a different man now, but I have a sense he is going to disappear a little bit. Like the famous “break” of late 2012/early 2013 — except longer, and more private. Just my hunch.

I suppose it’s possible he’s on ESPN FC in a few months. But I think he will do something quite different. Not at all the typical “post-career footballer” thing. Teaching, maybe? College, certainly. Medical school? Something out of the box, for sure.

Anyway, thanks to our reader for sending along the piece (linked, above). It definitely is worth a read.