Month: November 2021

Categories
Soccer Timbers

Sebastián Blanco’s second-half brace sparks Portland’s 3-1 playoff win against Minnesota United

Photo by Kris Lattimore

Sebastián Blanco’s last memorable MLS Cup Playoff moment came in November 2018.

With Portland behind 1-0 on aggregate and in Kansas City, the club needed a lifeline to extend its season — at least one more game. In the 52nd minute Blanco provided one, seemingly out of nothing, with a right-footed shot that swerved and dipped above the outstretched fingertips of Sporting Kansas City goalkeeper, Tim Melia.

The goal silenced the crowd at Children’s Mercy Park and left Diego Valeri with both hands on his head, speechless. Blanco’s moment of individual brilliance sparked a 3-2 road victory that helped the club reach its second-ever MLS Cup Final.

Three years later, Blanco delivered his latest playoff statement, scoring a second-half brace in the Timbers 3-1 win against Minnesota United to help his team advance to the Western Conference semifinals. 

“I think the entire team had a strong performance tonight, but there were those moments that we took that [Blanco] was able to find to take our quality to a higher level,” head coach Giovanni Savarese said. “He definitely brought the magic into the game to give us the edge that we needed.”

Blanco lives for those moments. Earlier in that 2018 playoff run, the Argentine scored a 78th-minute goal in Seattle, which proved crucial in sending the game to added time after Raúl Ruidíaz’s goal in the 93rd minute. In last season’s MLS is Back tournament, Blanco’s timely goals helped Portland win its most recent trophy. 

But not even a month after Portland beat Orlando City in the tournament final, Blanco tore his ACL. He couldn’t play in the Timbers’ home playoff match against FC Dallas, which they lost on penalties.  

In his return to playoff action, Blanco appeared a step slow right out of the gates. A few touches went awry, passes weren’t perfect and, at one point, he even skied a free kick from right outside the box. 

Blanco’s afternoon this past weekend seemed destined to be cut short, too, after a foul in the first half kept the midfielder on the turf and prompted the medical staff to come out onto the field with a stretcher. Blanco got up under his own power, however, and he finished the first half. Then, at halftime, Blanco reset. 

His first goal came in the 47th minute, when he put his laces through the ball on a half-volley that sped past the reaching arms of goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair. Those who paid close attention could observe visible pain on Blanco’s face as he grabbed his back amid the celebration. Still, he stayed in the game.

The Timbers game plan ahead of the match was to exploit space between the lines in Minnesota United’s formation. More specifically, Savarese wanted Blanco, Dairon Asprilla and Yimmi Chará to continue to push and play into space between the Loons midfield and defense. The most evident example of this came in Blanco’s second goal.

Reminiscent from his strike on that November night in Kansas City, Blanco took a few touches in those spaces between the lines before firing a shot from outside the box that swerved, hit the top-right post and deflected into the back of the net to give Portland a 3-1 lead. No Minnesota defender even attempted to close Blanco’s space down. 

The Argentine made his curtain call in the 88th minute, replaced by Santiago Moreno. As he walked off the field to a rapturous applause, Blanco took a moment to reflect.

“I worked a lot for this moment,” Blanco said. “It’s been a long time for me waiting for this.” 

While Blanco’s two second-half goals made the difference in the final scoreline, the Timbers’ win came down to more than their designated player firing on all cylinders in the second half. 

Portland wouldn’t have won without the 90-minute effort of Asprilla, who consistently turned “50-50” balls into “70-30” situations. His aggression to fight for loose balls and willingness to drive at Loons defenders allowed his team to build dangerous possession. If not for Minnesota defender Bakaye Dibassy’s perfectly timed foot placement, Asprilla could have finished the afternoon with a first-half goal. 

The Timbers eventually did equalize in the waning moments of the first half. Just minutes before his towering header tied the game at one, defender Larrys Mabiala attempted a bicycle kick that required a goal-line clearance. Throughout nearly a three-minute stretch, Portland fans grew louder in voice as their team mounted so much pressure that the Loons defense cracked. 

Mabiala played an outsized role in helping the Timbers shut down Minnesota United’s front four. Other than scoring the early goal, Minnesota United never felt as if it had a foothold in the game and a large part of that was because of the defense. In the team’s last four games, all wins, Portland has given up just two goals.

And, ahead of the defense, sat Christhian Paredes and Diego Chará, who both more than held their own, especially against the Loons talented designated player, Emanuel Reynoso. Paredes, especially, put fans on notice with his defending. A few of his challenges even sparked a threatening Timbers’ counterattack. 

“The energy and support that we received today was the extra energy for us to push forward, get the result and take care of business,” Savarese said.

When Portland went down a goal in the 11th minute Sunday afternoon, it would have been easy for them to fall victim to the moment and momentum, especially considering the opponent: Minnesota United has been the Timbers’ bogeyman over the years, with seven wins and just two losses against Savarese’s team before Sunday. 

“We’ve proven that we can win there,” Loons head coach Adrian Heath said shortly after his team made the postseason by virtue of Real Salt Lake beating Sporting Kansas City in the final moments of Decision Day.

In practices leading up to the game, Savarese and his staff stressed the importance of not allowing Minnesota to get in behind the fullbacks and get a cross off — but that’s how they found the opening goal. 

The goal came through Franco Fragapane, who tapped in a squared ball from Romain Métanaire after the winger raced into the space vacated by outside back Claudio Bravo. Loon players celebrated like a team that knew how one-sided the matches between the two clubs have been. They may have even let their foot off the gas — because after that goal, Minnesota United didn’t generate many other chances.

Portland could have easily allowed the deficit to snowball; something they’ve done in some of their more lopsided defeats back in the summer. Instead, they scored three unanswered goals. 

“There was no pressure, there was only the disappointment that we allowed them in the only attack that they had to be able to score,” Savarese said. “But we knew that we were going to fight through that, and we needed to play our match.”

Added Blanco: “We started losing the game, and after that we played very mature. We created many chances and after we scored the second goal, we were still playing with the same intensity.”

What’s next for the Timbers? They travel to Colorado for a Western Conference semifinal matchup against the Rapids at 1:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving day. 

“They have a very, very good team at home,” Blanco said. “They’re very strong and we have only four days to prepare for that game. We focus now on the game and try to rest at home before tomorrow getting ready for the next game.”

So as the final whistle sounded on the Timbers’ win and children and family poured out onto the Providence Park field, there was an understandable sense of jubilation as players breathed a sigh of relief. 

The Loons may well continue to have Portland’s number going forward. It still says something that before Sunday night, their last defeat to the Timbers came in April 2018. But in the first game between the two clubs with actual stakes attached to it, the Timbers took care of business to keep their season alive.

“We’ve never beat Minnesota in the last two years,” Blanco said. “But playoff games are different than the regular season.”

Categories
Soccer Timbers

Blanco Show Sends Timbers to Colorado

Blanco celebrates. Photo by Kris Lattimore.

It was apparent from the very early stages of Sunday afternoon that Sebastian Blanco was going to have an outsize impact on the Portland Timbers’ 2021 playoff opener.

In the end, we got the full Blanco experience. He blasted a clean look inside the box and a free kick just outside of it towards the south end scoreboard in the first half. He was booked for a brutal late challenge on Franco Fragapane. He hurt his back at the end of the half and limped off the side of the field with the stretcher poised.

Santiago Moreno warmed up on the field during the intermission after Blanco limped to the locker room, but when the bell tolled, the Argentine was right back out there — and two minutes later, his expertly-taken goal had lifted the Timbers into the lead for good.

For years now, despite his advancing age and despite the catastrophic knee injury that sidelined him for nearly 12 months, there have been precious few players in MLS so impossible to defend, so capable of single-handedly deciding games. We saw it in 2018, when Blanco scored jaw-dropping goals to help carry the Timbers past the Sounders in Seattle and Sporting KC in Kansas. And we might just be seeing it this year two — Blanco Superman-ing a good if not great Timbers team into a memorable playoff run.

It was obvious on Sunday afternoon, as it has been all season, how the Timbers feed on Blanco’s energy. By the end of the day, it was his two goals and his spitfire, no holds barred, relentlessness that Minnesota United couldn’t match.

The Timbers came from behind on Sunday afternoon at Providence Park to dump the Loons out of the postseason 3-1 and book a Thanksgiving Day showdown with the first seed Rapids in Colorado. If they survive and advance on Thursday, it will no doubt be due to a player signed as a complimentary piece who has long since taken the mantle as the Timbers’ primary, irreplaceable instigator.

The regular season numbers were crystal clear: the Timbers averaged 1.9 points-per-game with Blanco in the lineup, and just 0.9 without him. Without Blanco’s inspiration, Sunday’s first round match against Minnesota — the postseason match in front of fans at Providence Park in three years — could have gone very differently.

Minnesota arrived in Portland on the back of a challenging, uneven year in which they very rarely resembled the swashbuckling side that so nearly advanced to MLS Cup last season.

But Adrian Heath’s team entered the playoffs with no small measure of confidence regardless. With a veteran group of players, and a sterling recent record against the Timbers, regular season behind them, perhaps this would be the moment this year’s Loons stepped into their own.

It started well enough. After absorbing an early spell of Portland pressure, Minnesota broke forward with a sumptuously smooth move back-to-front move and took the lead. Old Timbers enemy Osvaldo Alonso picked the ball up deep in the Loons half and broke the Timbers’ midfield line with a forward pass for Emanuel Reynoso. The Argentinian playmaker got the ball wide to Robin Lod, who easily cut inside of Claudio Bravo and hit Romain Métanire on the overlap. Fragapane arrived unmarked on the back post to turn in Métanire’s cross, and it was 1-0.

As lovely a team goal as it was from Minnesota, it was a reminder of all that has gone wrong all season for Portland defensively: they allowed the Loons to play through their midfield with astounding ease, their fullbacks were both caught out, and the result was a tap in.

That Fragapane, who was accused of racially abusing Diego Chará on his last visit to Portland over the summer, was the player to finish the move was an especially bitter pill to swallow.

But unlike earlier in the year, the concession didn’t knock the Timbers off course. Instead, they continued to buzz and press forward — playing with the clear confidence of a team that finished the regular season as the hottest in MLS. It was a sign of things to come. Minnesota was up a goal, but was increasingly struggling to break the Timbers’ pressure and possess the ball. It felt like a matter of time before the one of the Timbers’ energetic front four broke through.

In the end, though, it wasn’t one of the front four who hauled Portland level — it was center back Larrys Mabiala, who first had a spectacular bicycle kick attempt cleared off the line from a free kick, and then, minutes later, sent a towering header from a short corner past Minnesota’s backup goalkeeper Dwayne St. Clair to tie the game.

Blanco went down injured shortly thereafter. But just following the restart, he made his biggest contribution yet. Chase Gasper and Bakaye Dibassy got crossed up trying to deal with a deep Claudio Bravo cross, and Blanco smashed the resulting half-clearance on the volley past St. Clair. He wheeled away in celebration clutching his back, likely in pain, but also perhaps making clear that even when hobbled, he was the most dangerous player on the field.

It was a hammer blow. Minnesota simply didn’t have the gear required to match the Timbers’ attacking intensity and movement, and as their own attacking players failed to get in rhythm, they became increasingly frustrated and impotent.

The game state had turned; now the Timbers, with all that pace, would have the opportunity to sit back and break forward at a Minnesota back six not blessed with any great amount of speed.

After 20 minutes, the Timbers’ third goal came from very little. Blanco picked up the ball from Felipe Mora some 25 yards from goal, took two steps forward, and smashed it in again off the inside of the post and into the back of the net.

The Loons were still up for a fight — they finished the match with six players having received yellow cards and the ill-tempered Fragapane lucky in the waning minutes to escape without a red — but they couldn’t hang with their hosts. Heath now has the offseason to figure out with his front office how to rejuvenate this Minnesota team.

The Timbers, as it turned out, didn’t need an offseason. Blanco’s return and a few tactical adjustments brought this team roaring back to life after its summer swoon.

It’s not just Blanco. Dairon Asprilla was a menace. Yimmi Chara was similarly active. Despite their ongoing defensively shortcomings, the fullbacks got forward effectively. And Mabiala, another old campaigner, came up with a signature moment in his very fine Timbers career.

A trip to the altitude of Dick’s Sporting Goods Park on short rest will be a stiffer test than this ultimately was. But you wouldn’t comfortably bet against the Timbers right now — not in the kind of form they’re in, and certainly not with the player they have leading the way.

Categories
Soccer Timbers

Timbers Face Minnesota as MLS Postseason Gets Underway

Minnesota United beat the Timbers in Portland in June. Photo by Matthew Wolfe.

The Portland Timbers’ up-and-down odyssey of a 2021 will be largely defined on the field on Sunday and in the weeks to follow, as the club begins its playoff journey with a match against Minnesota United.

This marks the Timbers’ club-record fifth straight playoff appearance and fourth straight under the management of Giovani Savarese—an accomplishment that Caleb Porter never came close to achieving during his time with the club.

But where Porter’s best teams more often than not made a substantial amount of noise in the playoffs, Savarese’s Timbers, have not won a playoff game since the second leg of the 2018 Western Conference final in Kansas City. They lost in the first round of the 2019 playoffs to Real Salt Lake and were defeated in last year’s opening round on penalties by Dallas in a vacant Providence Park.

This year, expectations are higher. The Timbers enter the playoffs on a roll, having won three straight games by multiple goals and averaging more than 2.2 points-per-game over the final two-and-a-half months of the season.

By going back to a tried-and-true formula—sitting compact defensively and pressing forward with tenacity—the Timbers closed as one of the league’s hottest teams.

The result was an ultimately comfortable fourth place finish in the West and hosting rights for this year’s first round playoff matchup with Minnesota United, with the Colorado Rapids waiting for the winner in Commerce City on Thanksgiving Day.

The Timbers aren’t an appealing matchup for anyone right now. But despite their outstanding form, this match against Minnesota may be a battle.

Adrian Heath’s Loons came within a game of reaching the MLS Cup last year, returned a substantial amount of playoff experience, and have one of the league’s finest playmakers in Argentine Emanuel Reynoso.

They also have a tremendous record against the Timbers in recent years. Most recently, the Loons beat Portland twice over the summer, once at Providence Park on a scorching June day and then again in St. Paul in July.

Of course, those two games came during one of the Timbers’ poorest stretches of the season, when Sebastian Blanco was not yet playing significant minutes and Jeremy Ebobisse was still the club’s starting center forward.

Much has changed since then. It feels like this will be a contest to see whether the Timbers’ high-powered attack can overwhelm Minnesota’s defense—or whether the Timbers’ defense, the second-poorest of any playoff team in either conference, will be exposed on the playoff stage.

Elsewhere in the West…

The winner of the game in Portland will face the shock Western Conference winners from Colorado on Thanksgiving.

On the other side of the bracket, Seattle hosts Real Salt Lake in a matchup that will see RSL face their former manager, Freddy Juarez, who walked off the job in the middle of the season to become an assistant with the Sounders.

RSL closed the season in chaotic fashion under interim manager Pablo Mastroeni, losing two straight games before sneaking into the playoffs thanks to a dramatic stoppage time winner from Damir Kreilach in Kansas City.

The Sounders, who are among the favorites to reach and win MLS Cup again, are getting healthy. Raúl Ruidíaz and Nicolás Lodeiro are back in the fold, and Jordan Morris, who tore his ACL last winter, played 45 minutes in the club’s regular season finale—and should play a significant role in the club’s postseason run.

Sporting Kansas City hosts the Vancouver Whitecaps in the other game on that side of the bracket, with the Whitecaps having become one of the stories of the season under their own colorful interim manager Vanni Sartini.

Sporting, like Seattle, was a juggernaut all year, playing excellent, clean Peter Vermes soccer and leading the conference in goals scored. But Sporting has also had a mostly appalling playoff record since their MLS Cup triumph in 2013, and a fair bit of that failure has come at home.

Seattle and Sporting are heavy favorites to advance, and if the Timbers join the Rapids on the other side of the bracket, it will be the West’s four best teams standing in the conference semifinals. But this being MLS, it’s dangerous to pencil those matchups in too soon.

And in the East…

The Supporters’ Shield-winning and record-setting New England Revolution lie in wait for the winner of New York City FC and Atlanta United at Yankee Stadium, with the road team in slightly better form after their horrific start to the season.

Atlanta has a manager who experienced plenty of playoff success as a player and assistant coach in Seattle in Gonzalo Pineda, while NYC boss Ronny Delia’s only prior playoff experience came last year when his team was defeated on penalties by Orlando in its first game. Delia’s team is dealing with a pair of significant injuries, while Atlanta is healthy.

But NYCFC has a significant home field advantage due to the oddities of playing at a baseball stadium, and they play more cohesive soccer than Atlanta has at any point this year. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

On the other side of the bracket, Nashville hosts Orlando.

The Lions, as has been their wont in recent years, are sputtering down the stretch.

Orlando has a few match winners, namely Nani, who hasn’t played in weeks and should be well-rested, but Nashville is as solid as any team in the league: consistent, strong defensively, and nearly impossible to beat at home.

The winner of that game will get the winner of an all-Northeast matchup in Chester between the Philadelphia Union and New York Red Bulls.

The Union, one of the stories of last year, quietly put together a very nice second half and enter the playoffs as one of the teams to beat in the East.

But their second half was not nearly the surprise that the Red Bulls’ was. Gerhard Struber’s team was given up for dead over the summer, sitting near the bottom of the Eastern Conference and playing rather miserable soccer in front of paltry crowds. They turned it around, though, high pressing with aplomb and stringing together 1-0 wins.

It remains to be seen whether the Red Bulls have the quality required to compete in the playoffs, but it is remarkable that they are here at all.

All the drama starts Saturday—the final act of a season unlike any other in MLS history.

Categories
Soccer Thorns

Some Thoughts on Endings

Credit: Matthew Wolfe

TW mention of suicide

Watching the Portland Thorns and Chicago Red Stars semi-final alone in my dorm room in Los Angeles, I felt numb. From the kickoff, something was off in the final third. The Thorns weren’t themselves. They seemed to be getting inside their own heads and psyching themselves out. While the stats showed the Thorns absolutely raining shots down on Chicago’s goal—21 to Chicago’s five—none of them were particularly threatening. It didn’t feel like the Thorns deserved to score. 

I wasn’t “having an okay time” seeing the team struggle on the field. They weren’t fighting for the ball as if their season depended on it, which it did. Maybe it was Lindsey Horan’s sudden freak injury or Crystal Dunn’s pregnancy announcement, but the personnel on the pitch seemed as though they had hardly played together. 

The Thorns haven’t had the best run of play leading into the playoffs; despite winning the shield, they won only three of their last 11 games. Ever since Paul Riley’s predatory behavior was made public, there has been a weight on the league that won’t lift. In the postgame, Emily Menges said that the team has done a great job of leaving these traumas off the pitch and focusing on soccer when they’re playing. I have to take her word for it, since I’m not in the locker room. However, I can’t help but think of the extreme mental toll that’s been taken on the players. 

Trauma and abuse as severe as what the players in the league have been through forges intense bonds between people. The foundation for that bonding was already in place. The Thorns have praised their team chemistry and culture throughout the season, saying that they are a team unlike they have been in the past and that they truly believe in one another.

But Menges and Christine Sinclair were on the team back in 2015, too. Having to relive terrible experiences while simultaneously working your job at a place that is entwined with toxicity is impossible for me to imagine, yet these players have done it.

They end the 2021 NWSL season with three of four trophies, which is an incredible feat they should be proud of. 

And yet, I think all these players need a long break. I’m not saying that it’s great that their season was cut short and that they are off now, but from the outside, it’s a bit of a relief. 

I’ve been through my own mental health struggles, which I wrote about for my school newspaper. I played soccer for 12 years at the club and high school levels, but had to quit due to the incredible pressure placed on me by my coaches and the toxic atmosphere my teammates created. Watching the game on Sunday, I couldn’t help but worry that this heavy NWSL season would turn players away from the league—or even from the sport they love altogether. I don’t want to make assumptions about what the players are going through, but I can’t help thinking about it in the context of my own experiences. 

After Chicago scored their second goal and the ref made several bad non-calls, the numbness overtook me. One aspect of the broadcast that particularly got to me was the repeated replays of the goals scored against Bella Bixby. Having only jumped up to first keeper midway through the season, the semifinal was her NWSL playoff debut. The Thorns’ playoff hopes rested on her shoulders. She was visibly frustrated after both goals, and the commentators talked about her reaction as the film looped. The broadcast even lingered on her after goal kicks, as if to implicitly blame her for the scoreline. As soon as the final whistle blew, the camera panned to Bixby, who was overcome with emotion. The camera stayed on her face far too long, and I, too, started to cry. 

Midway through Mark Parsons’s final media call as head coach of the Thorns, Bixby announced on Twitter that her father had died by suicide earlier that week. The rest of the world fell away as I read that. I barely registered another word that Parsons said. I knew exactly what Bixby was going through, and I couldn’t believe that she had just managed to play the most important game of her career. 

When I was 16, one of my close friends died by suicide, and I couldn’t do anything for weeks. Still, five years later, it’s hard for me to do things we used to do together. I can’t listen to Taylor Swift or have a picnic where we only eat veggie straws or see our horse, Willow, without crying. The mental strength it took for Bixby to go to work, to compete at the highest level, is something I cannot imagine, and I am so unbelievably impressed. It also made me more angry at the ways the broadcast fixated on her emotions. No matter the reason behind the sadness or emotions, they’re not for broadcasts or journalists to turn into content. 

When I lost my friend, I hated how people asked my mom, “oh, how is Jaiden doing?” for weeks. It never felt like genuine concern, just morbid curiosity. Like I was a museum piece.

I’m sad for the team, and how their season ended. There will not be a Thorns team like them again, with Parsons leaving and a roster shakeup inevitable with a double expansion draft next month. I’ll be sad to see people go, but I also know that the culture and community that the team has worked hard to create will inevitably be broken up. Losing that sense of safety and community so suddenly is hard to deal with.

Even with the team splintering off in the off-season, I hope they are still able to lean on one another as results of investigations are revealed. I particularly hope that Bella Bixby has people to support her. Having a group of people you can lean on no questions asked is one of the best tools for grieving. 

I don’t have much to say about the soccer played in that semifinal. But I do know that when you lose someone to suicide, it feels like the earth has stopped spinning.

If you suspect someone is suffering from suicidal thoughts or ideations, ask them about it point-blank. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s so much worse to regret that you didn’t ask. People who are suicidal feel as though they have no one to talk to. Showing them you’re the person they can talk to might save their life.

Categories
Soccer Thorns

That’s How it Goes in Soccer, Sometimes

Photo by Matt Wolfe

The Thorns fell to the Chicago Red Stars 2–0 in their semifinal match at Providence Park on Sunday. Despite both teams taking a major last-minute scratch—Lindsey Horan sat out the match after suffering an injury the day before, and Chicago was without Mallory Pugh due to COVID-19 protocol—the Red Stars were able to execute their game plan, and the Thorns saw yet another match where they struggled to put the ball in the back of the net.

It was a rough game in that the Thorns kind of knew what Chicago was going to do in advance—if not the exact game plan, at least some of what they’d be coming up against—but they weren’t able to do enough to actually counteract that strategy.

“Our last match against Chicago, I thought they did a really good job of keeping us to one side,” Becky Sauerbrunn said in a press conference ahead of the semifinal game. “They kind of invited us to play to one side of the field and then really committed numbers and kept us over there, and it was difficult to switch the play. So for us, it’s identifying open players, it’s identifying the space that we can capitalize on and how we can get the ball there. I think if we can do that we can do that successfully and relatively risk-free, that will really help us in our build up.”

And Chicago did the same thing this time around.

“They’ve turned up into probably the hardest place to play against probably the hardest team to play,” Mark Parsons said of Chicago’s semifinal performance. “Very stingy, very disciplined, very organized performance, and they’ve got a great result.”

The Red Stars applied pressure early, cutting off spaces and staying touch-tight on Sophia Smith. For their part, the Thorns saw some success when they were able to break up a Chicago attack, switch the ball, and counter up the other side of the field, but the Red Stars were able to limit the moments where that happened from early on.

“Chicago did a really good job of keeping a lot of people in their box,” Emily Menges said after the game, “and it was really hard to get anything clean off.”

It’s not that the Thorns were bad—they generated a fair number of chances and managed to play out of Chicago’s press enough to get a couple really solid looks on goal—but, even as they found more chances, they did do the thing they’ve been doing all year where they shoot a lot and don’t have all that much to show for it. Despite a 21–5 shot line and an xG total that played heavily in their favor, the Thorns just weren’t able to find the back of the net.

But beyond the stat lines, it wasn’t a game that felt good. Kealia Watt was subbed off for Chicago after she went down a little before the 30-minute mark, and goalkeeper Cassie Miller went down a couple minutes after that.

And then there was the Red Stars’ first goal: an (admittedly very good) shot from Katie Johnson that deflected weirdly off Bella Bixby’s hand and inside the near post in the 37th minute. And then Chicago struck again when Morgan Gautrat found an open Sarah Woldmoe outside of Portland’s box, and Woldmoe snuck her shot from distance past the Thorns’ defense and inside the near post.

Again, it wasn’t that Portland were bad in the closing 30 minutes of the game, but they weren’t able to do enough to win back either of the goals or to prevent the game from ending in a 2–0 loss and Chicago moving onto the final.

“The ball didn’t bounce for us in the 18 tonight,” Christine Sinclair said after the match. “We created a lot of half chances, a lot of crosses, but we just weren’t on the end of them.”

That’s how it goes in soccer, sometimes.

It’s a tough note to go out on, especially with Parsons set to leave for the Netherlands and the inevitable roster shakeup that comes with two expansion drafts and a new head coach, especially after the fallout of the front office covering up Paul Riley’s abuse, especially with Bixby playing through her dad’s passing just days before—and especially when the Thorns had set out to win everything this season and ended up falling just short.