More from MLS on Seattle

By Anonymous (not verified), May 5, 2022

IT DESERVED TO BE SEATTLE

MLS Kickoff StoryIt deserved to be Seattle. It might pain you to hear it or write it, but deep down, in your heart of hearts, you know there's no escaping from the belly of the Rave Green-wearing whale until you concede that no one has been more consistent, more excellent and more worthy of bursting through a ceiling that didn't feel impenetrable as much as it felt cursed to the touch.It still might be cursed, honestly. It's not like we rode the best possible timeline last night. There's a multiverse out there that skipped over the injuries to Nouhou and Joao Paulo and went right to the 3-0 beatdown and ended with a stadium-wide celebratory musical number led by Brian Schmetzer and Nico Lodeiro. Instead, we got a possible long-term injury to Paulo and not a single chorus line. At least we still go the beatdown.Even as confident as I felt going into last night that the Sounders were fated for this—like I said yesterday, sometimes the plot is the plot—they still had to endure the final flailing moments of danger from a Concacaf curse that died with all the grace of a T-800. Just like in the first leg, down 2-0 in Mexico City rain, they found the Concacaf Uno reverse card that no MLS team before them discovered. Kelyn Rowe came in for the injured Nouhou and Seattle's backline continued to stifle Pumas. 16-year-old Obed Vargas came in to replace Paulo, perhaps the best overall midfielder in MLS, and handled himself well in the biggest game in club history. What would have been the beams that buckled under immense weight for previous MLS teams doomed to collapse held firm. And once the shellshock of Paulo's injury wore off, Seattle and a record crowd were back on a singular mission.That's a mark of a culture years in the making. That's a sign of a team that learned from both its MLS Cup-winning moments in 2016 and 2019, and the mistakes that kept them from similar moments against Columbus in 2020 and against Club Leon in 2021. It's also the mark of a team filled to the brim with talent led by the most effective manager per capita in league history. Let's not lose sight of the fact that, in addition to needing culture and luck to break a curse, you need a damn good soccer team. What Sounders general manager Garth Lagerwey has accomplished in acquiring talent through nearly every available MLS mechanism and what Brian Schmetzer has done to get the most out of that talent with consistency has now made them the most successful pairing in MLS history. It took six years of club-wide and league-wide growth to get to that point.The bottom line is that any other team would have been celebrated, but they would have been considered a flash in the pan. "The right team at the right time" instead of just the right team. It wouldn't have felt hollow, but the textures of last night made it special. The sold out crowd, the sense of scale and scope appropriate for a continental final, and the understanding of the weight of a moment the club that had been building towards it since they invented soccer back in 2009 coalesced into something backed by history and with staying power for the future of soccer in Seattle and in North America.They won't be the only MLS team to win this competition. But they will always be the first. The dividing line of eras for a ridiculous league that somewhere along the way learned how to play pretty good soccer and has now set itself up to take off its financial training wheels and become a regular and powerful presence in a competition that now takes on a new meaning because nearly 69,000 people in Seattle decided to care a whole lot. And because a team that defines themselves by the gravity they create pulled them in enough to care.In the third minute of stoppage time in the 2022 Concacaf Champions League final, with Seattle Sounders FC up 3-0 against Pumas UNAM, Seattle manager Brian Schmetzer, wholly aware of the moment, subbed off Nico Lodeiro, Jordan Morris and Raul Ruidiaz to a standing ovation. Each player carrying with them their own unique contribution to six years that earned a night for a city in the Pacific Northwest to be the center of the continent.

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