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| You are my God, there is no other. |
Where to begin? With the ass-clenching anxiety of the final
30+ minutes, the beside-myself joy,
or empathy for Sporting Kansas City for having the year they had and, yeah,
Zarek Valentin probably really should have been sent off for a second yellow…
…then again, I’m good with that so long as you are…and,
clearly, I’m only addressing persons outside the greater Kansas Citys, MO/KS
and/or Seattle, WA metro areas. That was fucking incredible, right, a miracle
on frosted grass (they play on grass in KC, right?), and a smoldering tribute
to the lately infectious power of positive thinking?
As alluded to in the penumbra between the words above, the
Portland Timbers advanced to MLS Cup 2018 on the back of a 3-2 road win in Kansas City, MO. Exactly two teams of 18 left Children’s Mercy Park with a win
in all of 2018, a fact that threads garish neon threads around Portland’s accomplishment
for tonight. And, for the record, I’m entirely serious about sparing a thought
for everyone involved in the Sporting Kansas City organization and fan base
(except the assholes who threw shit on the field after Portland’s second,
stumbling goal; and, while I’m on it, has anyone else ever seen a coach step
out to appeal to his crowd’s better angels like Peter Vermes did tonight
(#StockRising)?). They believed every bit as inordinately in SKC’s odds of
victory as Timbers fans believed in their own going into tonight (i.e., most of
the hiccups in faith were my own), but that surely dissolved the second after Diego Valeri sank to his
knees in disbelief after he scored his make-your-own-luck header (e.g., the "second, stumbling goal" noted above). I’ve never felt as
close to him as I did in that moment (I'm buyin' the rounds, Diego!). And then Valeri got another one, and off the
counter that would always follow so long as SKC pressed too high and the
Timbers had available outlets…
…sorry, pausing again. Does this feel like ecstasy to anyone
else? I mean the drug, not the state of mind. I’m just really, really happy
right now, and on the grounds that, holy shit…the Timbers did it. They did all
of it. Three fucking goals, in Kansas City, which, for what it’s worth, equals exactly 1/6 of the goals
allowed in Kansas City during the regular season. (In the event I’m phrasing that badly, SKC
allowed 18 goals at home during the regular season (the source of my math), and three goals tonight.)
I’m grasping at quantity because it’s tangible.
But there’s nothing tangible about Sebastian Blanco’s equalizer, aka, the goal
he seemed destined to score since 2018 started. That shit is permanently transcendent,
just like Dairon Asprilla’s equalizer against Seattle about a month ago; it’s lore
for the fan-base, a permanent, defining “where were you moment” that people
will share – something that goes double if the Portland Timbers manage to claw
their way all the way to the top, aka, hoisting MLS Cup to the sky for the
second time in the franchise's short history.
The question I want to close on tonight – yes, this will be
shorter than usual (actually...) – was whether I, personally, lost faith at any point
tonight. I’ll answer that with a full, and contextually accurate, and
annotated, reproduction of something I tweeted during halftime tonight (yeah,
yeah, normal people embed; still striving over here):
“Keep limping Salloi, plz. [he did; he limped right off the field, and early]
That was a wheezin’ half. Concerned.
The fullbacks are getting wrecked, especially Zarek [grimacing emoji.]
I am appreciative of the green shoots.
May the (sic; shit!) become a mighty oak” [some hashtags, etc.]
Those green shoots grew in the end, and into strapping oaks.
And that brings me to the dirty secret that didn’t matter one fucking wit in
the end: Portland played a fucking terrible first half. There is no way to
overstate this, but Portland played nitrous-drunk (stoned? does nitrous slow
you down?) for the first 40 minutes of the game. Outside the train-wreck goal
they allowed, Portland rode luck, mystery, and everything in between to keep
this game 0-1 on the way to the locker room.
SKC attacked the Timbers’ fullbacks relentlessly during the
first half – Zarek Valentin, in particular, (like he kicked their puppy or
something) – and it generated shots, mistakes and panic – not just across the
back four, but in terms of getting the ball forward. This amounted to a total rejection of competence among every player in a Timbers uniform; it was bad, demoralizing...sad, even, like throwing your kid in the deep end and seeing nothing but bubbles.
The weird thing, the genuinely unfamiliar thing, if only where I live, came
with the absence of panic. I have no idea how all this ends, but I will say
that I’ve landed on my personal defining phrasing for the Portland Timbers’
2018: I’ve been conditioned to believe.
That’s how I watched SKC’s Gerso Fernandes come on to provide
another dose of stress to Zarek Valentin’s PTSD with equanimity, even after Daniel
Salloi left him with a lifetime’s worth of trauma over the first half (btw, thank you, Alvas Powell!). Valentin was the most overwhelmed member of the mix –
srsly, Salloi made him look anxious and/or amateur (see...oh, all of "train-wreck goal" link) - but just about every
player in white tonight (Portland) couldn’t master even the simplest
fundamental (or hold up against SKC’s attempts to thwart them). Jeremy Ebobisse
and Diego Valeri barely saw the ball during the first half, and Blanco glimpsed
nothing more than a gibbous of it; if you’d told me that the Timbers had a better chance of finding
the Northwest Passage (pre-global warming; no cheating) than they did a path to
SKC’s goal, that would have felt like truth to me…which
is weird, because, as confessed in a pre-game tweet, I went into this game
thinking that the Timbers would ultimately win it, if ugly and narrowly.
With that, we come to the miracle of the Timbers’ 2018: the
three attacking players the Timbers needed to step up tonight skipped a stair or
two on their way to glory: Blanco…made history, that’s obvious; to crib a thought
from Taylor Twellman, Valeri persevered, he found a way to change the game and
after tens of minutes of frustration, and,
however it happened, Ebobisse turned a first half of left-footed gaffes into
the positively heroic moment of coordination and bravery that lead to the
Timbers’ second goal. For as long as the 2018 season has gone on, the Timbers have
played on a margin that requires (per the sporting cliche only I and some of my friends know), soccer players to make soccer plays. The key players
keep making soccer plays, and all over the field too, so Atlanta United FC
beware, and I really hope I get to see the goddamn game (another tweet; it’s my
problem, not yours; just…I am such a consistent dipshit!).
All the above contains the Portland Timbers’
2018 post-season. Every time they haven’t been good, they’ve been ballsier to
make up for it. The entire 2018 season has centered on a tug-of-war between…unclear
talent and unstinting self-belief. Self-belief won that contest the day the
Timbers brushed past Dallas in the play-in round, and it’s been non-stop fun since then. At this
point, I’m not entirely sure what’s taking us where, but I’m delighted to be
along for the ride.
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