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| Always rooted for him too. |
You go through a soccer season, sorting out the players you can trust, developing a sense and/or set of beliefs about how far the local team can go, calibrating it from one week to the next by a combination of on-the-ground realities, personal biases, and outright daydreams. You get moments of clarity here and there, times when all those things come together and add up well enough…
…and then your local team has a night like tonight, a night that makes you feel either stupid or hubris-drunk depending how you read 120 minutes’ worth of tea leaves and a debacle of a penalty kick shootout. To finally pitch the headline, the Portland Timbers lost to New York City FC tonight, in Portland, and with the penalty kicks ending quickly enough to confirm an uneven night for the home side. You can play every game you get invited to, but you can’t win ‘em all…
How to describe that? Climbing a mountain, reaching the peak, then falling off the other side? Finally getting multi-ball, only to let all three-to-five balls slip away down both alleys and up the gut before you hit any of the jackpots? Having a tire go flat, discovering you have a spare and putting it on, only to realize you put the patches on wrong? Like playing euchre and having a solid hand when the bid ends in screw-the-dealer, only to get euchred by bad distribution? I’ll add other metaphors as they come to me, but it’s possible that’ll be the onlyone. two. three. four.
MLS Cup 2021 didn’t serve up a big corpse to dissect. There’s definitely a body on the slab - the Portland Timbers’ - but the time and cause of death seem straightforward enough. By my math, New York City FC looked the better, more (ruthlessly) organized team for…more or less, the first 80 minutes, then the Portland Timbers came too life with…yes, exactly enough time to spare, damn near down to the second, and they carried that momentum through the first half of extra-time. NYCFC got past the shock, regrouped over the second half of extra-time, and rallied to win their first major trophy on penalty kicks. And with breathing room. Hence the thing about falling off the other side of the mountain.
Sure, the Timbers got a couple bubbles under their butts from about the 25th minute only to have Valentin “Taty” Castellanos pop them when he broke wildly free at the back-post (didn’t I mention the back post?), to both nod home the opening goal and unsettle whatever game-plan the Timbers had run to that point…and that’s where I have questions.
…and then your local team has a night like tonight, a night that makes you feel either stupid or hubris-drunk depending how you read 120 minutes’ worth of tea leaves and a debacle of a penalty kick shootout. To finally pitch the headline, the Portland Timbers lost to New York City FC tonight, in Portland, and with the penalty kicks ending quickly enough to confirm an uneven night for the home side. You can play every game you get invited to, but you can’t win ‘em all…
How to describe that? Climbing a mountain, reaching the peak, then falling off the other side? Finally getting multi-ball, only to let all three-to-five balls slip away down both alleys and up the gut before you hit any of the jackpots? Having a tire go flat, discovering you have a spare and putting it on, only to realize you put the patches on wrong? Like playing euchre and having a solid hand when the bid ends in screw-the-dealer, only to get euchred by bad distribution? I’ll add other metaphors as they come to me, but it’s possible that’ll be the only
MLS Cup 2021 didn’t serve up a big corpse to dissect. There’s definitely a body on the slab - the Portland Timbers’ - but the time and cause of death seem straightforward enough. By my math, New York City FC looked the better, more (ruthlessly) organized team for…more or less, the first 80 minutes, then the Portland Timbers came too life with…yes, exactly enough time to spare, damn near down to the second, and they carried that momentum through the first half of extra-time. NYCFC got past the shock, regrouped over the second half of extra-time, and rallied to win their first major trophy on penalty kicks. And with breathing room. Hence the thing about falling off the other side of the mountain.
Sure, the Timbers got a couple bubbles under their butts from about the 25th minute only to have Valentin “Taty” Castellanos pop them when he broke wildly free at the back-post (didn’t I mention the back post?), to both nod home the opening goal and unsettle whatever game-plan the Timbers had run to that point…and that’s where I have questions.
