All Done

If you are a frequent reader of my blog posts, you know that Tom and I are soccer fans, and that we are avid supporters of our Seattle Sounders.

The Major League Soccer season (MLS) begins in early March, when we often go to the stadium in the cold and the dark. We feel blessed when it is not raining.

 In summer we enjoy warm day games and daylight evening matches. 

We usually go early, riding the light rail into Pioneer Square Station, where we join up with the March to the Match, always enjoying the camaraderie of fellow supporters in our beautiful city. 

We enjoy the pageantry of the opening of each match and participate in the singing of the National Anthem. 

We cheer the Emerald City Supporters when they deploy their tifo displays. 

This season Tom and I traveled to Vancouver BC, where our Sounders won the Cascadia Cup, a trophy that goes to the top PNW team, Vancouver, Seattle, or Portland. 

This season we also said farewell to our world class veteran, Clint Dempsey, perhaps the greatest of all US soccer players. Even the great ones wear out. 

Our team struggled this season until July, and then came from the bottom of the table to win 14 out of 16 matches to qualify second in the western division for the MLS Cup Playoffs. 

We met our greatest rival, the Portland Timbers, in the semi-final round, an away and a home match. Last night we played the home match. 

It was cold but clear, and many of us gathered in Occidental Park for the march to the match. The crowd was buzzing with enthusiasm. 

Tom and I ate a late dinner of Ivar's chowder and a shared order of fish and chips out on the third level concourse. The hot chowder warmed us in the chilly air. Overhead helicopters were hovering, monitoring the Mueller Protection March. Yes, Seattle is an activist city. 

The stadium filled slowly as fans fought traffic on a Thursday night, but fill it did, with nearly 40,000 of us there to cheer our Sounders on. The atmosphere was electric. 

It was a fury of a match, with all of us spectators on the edges of our seats or standing in tense attention, willing the ball to go into the net. The teams played to a tie, and went into overtime, where the score was tied again. Then it went to a shoot out.

That's where the Sounders came up short. At 11:00 at night, it was all suddenly over. The Portland fans went home elated, and the Sounders fans were disappointed. 

But not too disappointed. In the last two years we had been to the championship both years, winning the MLS Cup one of those years.  It can be someone else's turn. 

This was a crazy season, and an even crazier final. There were disappointing losses and elating wins. There were player injuries and recoveries and come backs and new additions and fond farewells. There were even very few rainy matches. 

When all is said and done, soccer is a game. It is a form of entertainment. We were entertained, indeed.