An American club went to Mexico and won a game last night. We should be doing back flips, right? Throwing ragers, cracking the seal on our best bottles of special edition liqueur, inviting the breakers of "The Streak" (FC Dallas, in case you hadn't heard) to our homes to eat our food and sleep with our wives. Finally, finally, FINALLY, the nightmare is over. MLS CAN win in Mexico, and now we have the proof. Everyone breathe.
Of course, because of the circumstances, what should be a day of rampant and debaucherous celebration is instead a ho hum Thursday with a couple of half-hearted attempts to fire up the fan base. It's really not much of a story, even though FCD's win was the first of its kind in MLS history. Hyndman and company slayed the dragon. Marvin Chavez is an American soccer hero.
Yawn?
Perhaps FC Dallas isn't sexy enough to get the blood of American soccer fans pumping. I suppose the reserve side UNAM Pumas sent out against FCD takes the sting out of a one-goal win. Maybe it was the late Wednesday night start, or the fact that the game wasn't on live TV anywhere. Seriously, why wasn't that game on live TV anywhere. If I'm going to be up until midnight on a school night watching soccer, I shouldn't have to go searching for skeevy streams to do it.
Let me propose another possibility for why the excitement over FCD's accomplishment is at levels more appropriate for a win over a USL side in the Open Cup: maybe we're not feeling as inferior as we used to. There's reason to be pretty high on MLS at the moment, and while the o-fer in Mexico hung over the league's head like a cartoon rain cloud, it's not as directly connected to American soccer's relative quality as it once was. If Fabian Espindola didn't turn into a pumpkin at exactly the wrong time earlier this year, RSL would have beaten Monterrey. They nearly did anyway. So we're not as anxious about that Mexico thing anymore.
Probably not though. That's a windy road I've laid out from Point A to Point B. Really, MLS fans that carried the Mexicurse burden are just too relieved, regardless of the how's or why's, to have much of a reaction at all. It's been an ordeal.
Thank God it's over.
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