The Boston University women’s soccer game ended with a strong 3-1 victory for the Terriers Saturday night. But the most important part of the game was in the stands.

I saw a little girl, of elementary school age, sitting in row nine cheering on Katie Chen as she scored the Terriers’ final goal.

To all of the CEOs of major corporations that have some money burning a hole in their pockets, I ask you to look into the eyes of that young girl, and bring it back.

Don’t let the Women’s United Soccer Association die. Don’t give up on the best role models young women – and men for that matter – have.

The WUSA suspended play last week, just five days before the start of play at the FIFA Women’s World Cup. The Board of Governors, led by Chairman John Hendricks, gave up on the three-year-old soccer league because there was no money left. The league needs eight sponsors paying $2.5 million each year to keep the league running with its current eight teams.

So the league was running $16 million in the red. So investors were avoiding it like the plague. They are making a mistake. This league was created so that women’s soccer could progress into the next century. So, why hold them back?

This is a league that is more fundamentally sound than Major League Soccer. The best men in the world play in England’s Premier League, Spain’s La Liga or Germany’s Bundesliga. They want nothing to do with the MLS and neither do I.

The women’s league, on the other hand, had the world’s best players. Fifty-six WUSA players representing 11 different countries are competing in this month’s Women’s World Cup. Women are hoping for the chance to leave their international club teams and play in the WUSA, while men with soccer aspirations leave the United States as if they were members of the Taliban leaving Afghanistan’s caves.

If CEOs out there could see how many opportunities this league gave female athletes, they would never drop their sponsorships. Even Boston University’s women’s soccer goalkeeper has said she would have liked to be considered for the WUSA draft.

‘I did have aspirations [of playing professionally],’ Jessica Clinton, BU’s senior goalie, told The Daily Free Press last week. ‘It’s a great letdown for women’s soccer.’

On the BU team alone, there are others who express a similar sentiment.

‘The league created great opportunities for women,’ said senior tri-captain Rebecca Beyer. ‘It was a family-oriented league [and] it’s really sad that it’s not here anymore.’

The sponsors need to come back and I believe they will. You can’t run away from a sport that in 1991 brought a World Cup championship to the United States with no fanfare whatsoever, and by 1999 was broadcasting nationally one of the highest-rated television events of that year the women’s world cup final.

BU Athletic Director Gary Strickler contends the league’s suspension will not affect the popularity of college soccer.

‘It’s a regrettable thing that the league couldn’t make it, [but] I don’t think the door is completely shut,’ he said.

But we need this league to resume play. Those CEOs, save for Hyundai and Johnson ‘ Johnson, must put up the money for the league to resume play next season, not in two years, as Mia Hamm expects. ‘Major sponsors committed to bringing back world class women’s soccer could enable a successor league to launch in 2005,’ she told The Associated Press.

Yet, what unfolded this weekend at Nickerson Field sent me a message that the league needs to come back as fast as possible.

If any of the CEOs could have seen that girl’s eyes, they would give $5 million a piece without flinching.

We need this league. If not only for the great talent in women’s college soccer, we need it for the wide-eyed girls out in the stands who look up to these women, hoping to one day don a WUSA jersey and lace it up with the best in the world.

And it’s not only for the little girls it’s for all of us. You would think, as a man, I would look up only to Nomar Garciaparra, Michael Jordan, Pete Sampras and Barry Bonds well, all except the latter. Along with Nomar, Michael and Pete, I also look up to Julie Foudy.

Foudy is not only a great soccer player and member of the Women’s National Team, but she champions causes like equality in sports and is a spokesperson for Uniroyal’s and USYSA’s Top Soccer Program, a group that creates opportunities for kids with disabilities to play soccer. Who couldn’t love this woman?

This is who that little girl in the stands looks up to a woman who stands up so that little girls like her have an arena in which to play.

So, I challenge the CEOs, especially the five percent of them who are women, to step up to the plate and help the Jessica Clintons of the world realize their dreams of playing sports at the highest levels in the world. I challenge them to reach into their 10-figure pockets and remove the miniscule amount it takes to run this league. And I challenge them to do it as quickly as possible.

That little girl in row nine is depending on it.

Nikhil Bramhavar, a senior in Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, is a weekly sports columnist for The Daily Free Press.