The belief was overwhelming. Hope. Desire. Ambition. It was all palpable as the guys walked across the pitch from the bus to the locker room on Wednesday night, and in the process, slapped me a high five, or gave myself and Joe Cannon a "bro hug." There are moments in my sports related life that I would like to stay in forever, and 5:30pm-7:30pm before the knockout round game against Vancouver was more than a moment, it was a stay in the emotional space between elation and terror, devoid of any anxiety, but full of the unknowable and all its inherent excitement. It all felt so right, the Earthquakes in the Audi 2017 MLS Cup Playoffs, the natural home of a two-time league champion.
From my paradigm, the Quakes had been playing playoff-like games for the previous three weeks. They rebounded nicely after a spanking from Chicago to beat Portland, got a huge late equalizer from Vako in Vancouver to move above the playoff line, and of course there was the instant classic this past Sunday that climaxed with Marco Urena's stoppage time stunner to send San Jose to the playoffs with a 3-2 win over Minnesota. They earned their spot, despite the pointless cries from some of "what about the goal differential?! Won't someone please think of the goal differential!"
It all simultaneously mattered and didn't matter. We all knew how the Quakes got to that point, but when you're watching Tommy Thompson warm up before the biggest game of his life, you're not thinking about wins and losses of weeks and months past, you're focused on the possibilities of what might yet come to fruition in the next 90 minutes of soccer. There's the hope again, the ambition. I looked around and saw Jesse Fioranelli, not even a full calendar year into his reign as GM, looking on with what I perceived to be optimism, and appreciative curiosity at what the team had been able to accomplish. I saw head coach Chris Leitch, animated, focused, talking to his players, his staff. In talking to Nick Lima and Fatai Alashe, I could feel how badly both of them wanted to be healthy, to be able to take part in what was about to happen on the pitch.
We know what happened in the game. I won't dwell on it, but it was disappointing, for sure. My brief synopsis is that in light of the playoff-like soccer the team had been engaged in over the past three matches and the quick turnaround to go from the emotional roller coaster of Sunday to playing again on Wednesday, they ran out of gas. Don't get me wrong, I wish we had won, but the overwhelming hope and optimism, and how correct the Earthquakes being in the playoffs felt to me, has me in the mindset that 2017 was the start of something big, not the end of something brief. This was not just a team "happy to be there." This team will be back in 2018, and they'll be back in the playoffs. We're not done, we're just waiting.
