BERLIN - Three weeks of sparkling soccer has done what six decades of soul-searching could not: It's made Germans proud to be German again, and prouder still of national team captain Michael Ballack, the sports prodigy who left the East to become a star in the West.

Trace the arc of Ballack's career and it reads like a founding legend that modern Germany would write for itself.

Born in 1976 in the eastern half of a still-divided nation, his parents sent their 7-year-old son to play for the local club in Chemnitz, a city known as Karl-Marx-Stadt at the time. Even then, the deftness of Ballack's touch and his skill with both feet marked him as something special.

By his third season, Ballack was delivering goals for the town's youth team with the precocity of a young Wayne Gretzky ¡ª 57 in only 16 games ¡ª and so began his climb up the ladder of the state-controlled sports system.

It might have plateaued right there, leaving Ballack, like hundreds of topflight East German athletes, with little more to show for it than a decent apartment and a car. But then the wall came down in 1989, and suddenly he was staring at a wide world of possibilities.

In the years that followed, Ballack rounded out his game and became a fixture at bigger and wealthier German club teams in the Bundesliga and, finally, the field general for fabled Bayern Munich.

Now, two months shy of his 30th birthday and acclaimed as one of the finest midfielders in the game, Ballack is about to leave Germany for England's Premier League. But first he is being asked to recreate the success of that personal journey while carrying the hopes of a nation on his broad shoulders.

"His role is hugely important for us," coach Juergen Klinsmann said on the eve of Germany's semifinal Tuesday against Italy. "He leads the way."

That comes as little surprise. How Ballack won that role, though, is a different story.

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