I must have seen that scene over a hundred times—and I still like watching it.

Brandi Chastain scoring the winning goal for the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team to take the 1999 World Cup. As soon as her rocket of a kick went past the Chinese goalkeeper, Chastain did a John Travolta-like slide down the field and was swarmed by ecstatic teammates jumping around her as she triumphantly held up the number one with her finger.

That was a good scene. And I wasn’t alone in thinking so. Like I said, I saw it at least a hundred times — it was replayed everywhere.

But, almost immediately it seemed, the story became more than sports — it became politics.

This wasn’t a victory for the U.S. Or for the growing popularity of soccer. Or for the individual women of the team. It was a victory — we were all told — for Title IX.

Title IX, after all, was the law that said you had to let girls play sports. Without Title IX forcing the chauvinistic sports world to let girls play, these fabulous female athletes would have been stuck at home crocheting. Or so said the talking heads.

And I have to admit, I bought it.

After all, I played sports — soccer, in fact. And I liked it. I certainly wouldn’t have taken kindly to somebody marching me off the field and informing me it was “for boys only.” I am horrible at crocheting.

“Power to Mia!” I cried.

But, what I’ve learned from a new book by Jessica Gavora, is that that view of Title IX — shared by most Americans — is way too simplistic.

In Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX, Gavora, a writer and public-policy expert, explores what Title IX was originally intended to do and how enforcement of the law has gone absurdly wrong.

She backs up her points with hard statistics and moving stories, both of which push you to give Title IX an honest intellectual look. And almost every chapter holds a juicy nugget of information that those talking heads forgot to tell you.

Nugget #1: Title IX never mentions sports.

That’s right. The law that has become synonymous with sports doesn’t even mention them.

Title IX was passed in 1972 and was pretty straightforward: No one could be “excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity” based on their sex.

In a nutshell, that was it. You couldn’t exclude women from campus or discriminate against them once they were there simply because they were women. Sounds fine so far.

So how did Title IX become the “girls’ sports law”?

By a carefully crafted strategy, Gavora reveals.

Title IX was supposed to guarantee equal opportunity — everybody gets an equal chance to succeed. Feminists wanted “gender equity” — a guarantee that women would move into previously “male dominated” areas.

But where exactly were men dominating in education? “With few exceptions,” Gavora points out, “[females] outperform, outscore and out-graduate their male counterparts.”

There was, however, one area where boys still came in first: school sports. So sports are where the activists decided to strike.

In 1979, the U.S. Department of Education — with major input from liberal women’s groups — released a “policy interpretation” letting universities know that Title IX would be enforced in their athletic departments.

But, from the beginning, sports posed a challenge. Very few females can compete athletically on the same level as males — so we have separate teams (soccer, track), different rules (smaller basketball for women) and, sometimes, separate sports (baseball and softball). How do you ensure equal opportunity in this kind of setting?

It would be a challenge. But, the feminists weren’t interested in the challenge; they just wanted more women in sports. So inside the Education Department’s “interpretation” was what has now become known as “the proportionality test.”

Nugget #2: It’s all about quotas.

What is a “proportionality test”? Simple statistics. If a school is 51 percent female, then 51 percent of the athletes better be female. If the two percentages don’t match up, the school is guilty of discrimination. Doesn’t matter how hard it has recruited, how much money it has spent, or even if females are interested. If the numbers don’t add up, it’s discrimination.

Here’s where the problems begin. And Gavora does a superb job of articulating them.

First, this is a quota system, pure and simple. And quotas communicate one thing: Helplessness. Women can’t earn their own spots, draw their own crowds, or convince donors to fund their sports. Government has to intervene.

It’s ironic to me that activists who proclaim “women can do anything men can do” would resort to portraying women as victims. Even if men dominated sports in the past, does a quota really help women achieve or just manufacture the illusion of success? Or, to put it another way, should my calculus final be bumped up 10 points because women used to be excluded from math classes? Have I really learned more?

Second, “proportionality” denies any difference between women and men. The central premise of proportionality is that, given the chance, women and men will want to compete in sports at an equal rate, and must, therefore, be given equal slots.

But is that true?

Quoting everyone from social scientists (whom I would largely agree with) to evolutionary scientists (whom I wouldn’t) to pollsters, Gavora makes the point that women and men have very different interests.

Boys prefer organized, rough, competitive games. Girls’ interests vary much more beyond those. And the interests aren’t forced onto children by a self-serving, male-dominated society, as feminists would have us believe. The interests are there from birth.

Of course, any first-grader could tell you that.

Now this doesn’t mean that no girls like to play competitive sports. Many do. But not at the rate that boys do. So should we go on enforcing regulations that have a flawed premise?

Nugget #3: The government thinks cheerleaders aren’t athletes.

Of course, there are athletic endeavors where women not only participate — they dominate. Take dance or cheerleading. Gone are the pom-pom popularity contests of yesteryear. Today’s cheer and dance squads are organized, crowd-pleasing, and boy, oh boy, are they athletic.

But Title IX bureaucrats refuse to allow cheerleading or dance to be counted toward the percentages. Because they’re not sports? Obviously not. These squads have funding, coaches, championships and scholarships. I’ve even watched their competitions on ESPN. Gavora explains:

“It is a measure of the scorn Title IX activists have for what they regard as traditionally female pursuits — and the perverse reverence they have for traditionally male activities — that they refuse to recognize these talented and dedicated young women as athletes. . . . Unless girls are behaving more like boys and less like girls, they don’t meet the government’s definition of what constitutes competitive athletics.”

Nugget #4: More men have lost athletic opportunities than women have gained.

The whole point of Title IX enforcement in sports, we were told, was to get more women involved. But the major impact of Title IX has been on men.

When “proportionality” first came down the pike, universities went along. Through the ‘80s, most schools added female sports.

But soon universities started to feel the pressure. They simply couldn’t find enough female sports or athletes to get their percentages even.

At Ohio State, coaches desperate for female rowers placed an ad in the student newspaper: “Tall athletic women wanted. No experience necessary!”

Even San Diego State University, which was ordered by the courts to achieve proportionality by the 1998-99 school year, couldn’t find enough female athletes to accept its scholarships.

With the number-crunching Clinton administration breathing down their necks, universities had to act. And as any math major will tell you, there are two ways to get the percentages equal. One is to add women. The other is to cut men.

And, across America, men were cut.

According to the NCAA, more than 200 men’s teams and over 20,000 male athletes disappeared from NCAA rosters between 1992 and 1997. During the same period, only 5,800 women’s spots were added.

An ongoing study by the Independent Women’s Forum has found that 359 men’s sports programs were discontinued from 1992 to 1999—including 43 wrestling teams, 53 golf programs and 16 baseball teams. All to get the numbers right.

Of course, this isn’t fair. But it continues, because most Americans don’t know it is happening.

And, really, that’s why Gavora’s book is important. She’s informing, with a lot more nuggets than I could get to here. And she’s asking hard questions: Are the statistics we’ve all heard really true? What are feminists’ ultimate goal for football? Why don’t feminists trust women to think for themselves? How is Title IX being stretched into areas like sexual harassment, standardized testing and scientific funding?

And, finally, is there hope? Is there a way that we can support women in sports without resorting to quotas and hatchets?

Gavora thinks there is, and I agree.

Because when it comes down to it, Brandi Chastain and the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team’s success is not about Title IX. After all, the women won the Cup in 1991 too, and there was no Title IX fanfare back then.

No, their success is about sacrifice and hard work — and lots of it. Those women earned their moment of glory.

And isn’t that what sports are all about?