Six miles from my Torrance front door a really rich guy has built a $150 million soccer shrine topped with a soaring, white roof that makes it seem more dream than reality — Carson’s Home Depot Center.

Despite a name more strip mall than sports venue, the complex evokes a Nick Hornby-like moment familiar to anyone who has read Fever Pitch, probably the definitive novel about being a hopelessly obsessed sports fan.

But the Home Depot Center is more than just a sports complex. The monument to what is a supposedly minor sport in this country probably represents soccer’s best hope for legitimacy.

I can’t see the stadium from my house, but I swear that sometimes, when the wind is right, you can feel the ghosts of soccer future striding across its green turf.

Pele, universally considered the greatest-ever player, is scheduled to show up for its grand opening Saturday along with a phalanx of past and present national team members. Sepp Blatter, president of the sport’s world governing body, will also attend.

Major international games, including many of those by U.S. national teams, are expected to grace the South Bay with regularity, all but guaranteeing the region becomes the American epicenter of the world’s most popular sport.

And some games of the women’s World Cup, which entered American consciousness so spectacularly in 1999 when millions watched a triumphant shirt-tossing Brandi Chastain at the Rose Bowl in the World Cup Final, seem likely to make an appearance this fall, perhaps even the final game.

The rabid ranting of an unabashed soccer fan? Certainly.

But the above is also an indication of just how seriously the powers-that-be are taking a purpose-built soccer stadium in one of the last nations to resist the sport’s allure. And it’s happening in the South Bay, where American youth soccer was born and the game has long been more popular than almost anywhere else in the country.For those of us afflicted with a love for what is regarded as the Rodney Dangerfield of sports in the United States, it’s a rare opportunity to gloat. After all, this is a nation where most people believe football is about gigantic men in fearsome helmets who mostly use their hands to play with a pointy ball.

Soccer has suffered for years in this country.

Much of the media couldn’t be bothered to understand even the game’s basic nuances.

Its own backers, more concerned with making money than nurturing the sport, indulged in rampant hyperbole that backfired as soccer stumbled.

And its image suffered because of problems with violent fans overseas.

Four days after I arrived in North America in late summer of 1977, exchanging constant English summer rain for sweltering East Coast humidity, temporary salvation seemed at hand for this then 14-year-old Brit as I hunkered down in a relative’s cool basement.

There was a live televised soccer game, the championship game of the now-defunct North American Soccer League, with no less than Pele playing.

Inexplicably, the live action was interrupted by a commercial.

Viewers returned from the break only to discover a goal had been scored (and, as soccer skeptics might observe, that doesn’t happen too often so you don’t want to miss one).

It turned out to be an apt demonstration of soccer’s status in the United States (somewhere after the sale of kitty litter or whatever ad it was, apparently).

But almost as bad as television executives who didn’t understand about soccer’s two 45-minute halves of uninterrupted action were its proponents.

Soccer was hyped as the sport of the 1970s.

Then the ?s. America yawned and the NASL petered out.

Then in May 1985, 56 people died in an antiquated English soccer stadium when a carelessly discarded cigarette burned the place down. Later that same month 39 people were killed in a riot in Belgium between alleged English and Italian fans.

And four years later, 95 people were crushed or trampled to death in an overcrowded stadium in Britain’s worst sports disaster.

Given that, no wonder America wanted no part of a sport that engendered such misplaced fanaticism.

Still, American fans hung on as soccer simmered just out of the public eye.

A generation after my arrival in North America, a funny thing has happened.

Kids who played AYSO soccer in the 1970s have become parents and their kids are now playing.

These days during the fall I have regular conversations with colleagues recounting their child’s weekend exploits.

Recently my boss, who could not be classified as any sort of soccer fan, extolled the pleasures of watching a tense 0-0 game.

Sure, his 8-year-old son was playing, but it’s from such experiences casual fans are made.

And unlike Europe and South America, soccer games in the United States are watched largely by families that give games a festive air missing elsewhere.

Soccer still has its problems.

Major League Soccer continues to hemorrhage cash.

The Home Depot Center would not have been built were it not for the cash and vision of that lone rich guy — Philip Anschutz — whose money also carries the league itself.

And much of the media still largely ignores the sport.

But if local kids peering out a car window on a local freeway spot that inspiring Home Depot Center roof glinting in the distance and realize they could exchange an AYSO field for that edifice, then pretty soon the dream of making soccer a viable sport in this country won’t be tenuous much longer.

Like the Home Depot Center itself, it will become reality.

Nick Green is a four-year South Bay resident and a reporter at the Daily Breeze.