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| Just 2015? No shit? |
I’ve always prayed for this day, without believing it would
arrive. At long last (fucking long, guys!) the much-fabled, oft-misunderstood
Soccer Gods finally smiled on one of their longer suffering Jobs. (That’s me. I
am Job. Or Gob. I hear some people do that.)
At various, yet shockingly consistent, and yet also
virtually never wire-to-wire…um, years, since a severely misguided internet
made it possible for every asshole (again, me) to write about Major League
Soccer, without editing, never mind overseers, I have written about Major
League Soccer. A three-four year stretch of me writing about the Portland Timbers
in the lower leagues happened…and that might have two-three years, mind you. (And I
can’t prove it either. Once I sour on a blog, I delete the motherfucker like I
never knew it. Seriously, I am Cronos and I eat my children.) In most of those
years, I tried to cover every part of whatever league I invested in most that
season. That always ended with me overwhelmed, bummed, or jaded (in all
honesty, it was jaded, like, 3/4 of the time) before the first ball rolled in
the playoffs. Still, I could fake keeping up until, oh, 2010. Once expansion
really kicked off…forget it. I’ve been gasping by Week 15, if not before, ever
since. Even for the glory years with the condensed games.
That brings me to the miracle. Its name is FC Cincinnati,
aka, the answer to my prayers and the solution to my problem. Also, the team
that will join Major League Soccer in 2019.
If I haven’t mentioned that I was born in, and spent the
first 13 years of my life in Cincinnati, Ohio, yes, I spent the first 13 years
of my life in Cincinnati, Ohio. I once heard it said that Danny DeVito collects
people from New Jersey, wherever he can find them; that’s me with people from
Ohio, only the shy version of it. In other words, whenever I meet
people from Ohio (or, sometimes, that general area of the Midwest, if mostly
north of the Ohio River…um…), I quietly, but almost automatically love them. I
left Ohio, basically, but it never left me. I’ll agree that identifying with a
place you almost never visit doesn’t make much sense, but I still rarely go a
week without thinking about Ohio. And which one of us is crazy, because I don’t
think it’s me.
Close observers might have caught the pronoun I slipped in
front of “Portland Timbers” up above. Yes, that was “my.” I stand by it. I love
my Portland Timbers and I moved to Portland, Oregon not once, but twice in my
life. I ultimately settled here and that
was very intentional. I love Portland. And yet I still look at real estate
prices in Cincinnati from time to time…shit would blow the mind of a Portlander....
