Best Season Ever Ends With Thud

Well, that sucked.  A glorious day, a wonderful tailgate, a great crowd, and a 1-0 last minute loss.  This is not how we envisioned our greatest season ever ending.  In the end Portland made the play we couldn't.  There will be a lot of discussion and some blame thrown around over the next 3 months but in the end I don't think there's any one person or one decision that cost us the game.  Sometimes you just get beat and this was one of those days.  It sucks, especially when you see we would be hosting 7th seeded FSL had we won, but the good news is that we're set up to roll into next season.

Random Musings:

• Maybe its my long history of being a fan of bad Seattle sports teams (Seahawks, Mariners, Sonics, Huskies, Kraken, never Sounders) but I'm at the point in sports where I've learned to never let the highs get you too high or the lows get you too low.  The only real exceptions to that are finals and rivalry games.  Washington losing the Apple Cup this weekend would have hurt more than the Rapids loss most years, except the Huskies have been so bad this year it didn't surprise me.  There's always next year.
• Along those lines we a 80 days (+/- a day) from our CCL first round road leg.  90 days from our opening MLS match of 2022.  So not a whole lot of time to dwell on this one compared to many offseasons.
• So the one moment a lot of Rapids fans are focusing on is the non-PK call in the 32nd minute.  I took a look at my recording from FOX and IMO that's a 50/50 call.  Some refs are going to call it, some aren't.  If it had been called against us we would have called it a soft penalty.  I don't think Unkel got it wrong and there's certainly no grounds for VAR to overturn it.
• The other complaint is that Fraser screwed up by leaving our top two scorers on the bench.  Barrios, of course, has been starting on the bench most of the last two months of the season.  In place our third-best scorer, and the one with the hot foot, Badji started.  Hard to fault a coach for riding with the hot foot.  In Lewis' place was Bassett, who had two less goals than Lewis.  Of course Lewis got those two goals in the final game of the season (and Cole got one as well) so its not like Lewis was clearly a better choice than Bassett.  In my projected lineup I had Galvan and Barrios starting in those two spots.  And of course, the only players to get shots on target were Badji and Bassett.
• We really suffered from not taking advantage of our first half dominance.  The more we let Portland hang around the more they grew into the game, and the flatter we went.  That's the one place I felt like Fraser failed is not seeing us losing momentum in the second half and changing things up earlier.  Subs should have been in the 60th minute and not the 70th.
• The last shot we got off was in the 72nd minute (a miss by Bassett).  At that point our expected goals were about double Portland's (1.2 to 0.6).  After that Portland had two good shots that jumped the expected goals to 2.1 (and obviously, one went in).  So not only did the subs come late, they essentially added no offense.  Despite putting in our two best scorers.
• The goal was all kinds of bad luck.  First the corner that it came from was unnecessary.  Yarbrough was playing it safe and made sure to get a hand on a high shot/cross but on replay that ball was going to be off target and out of play without him touching it.  Then the corner deflects off of Lewis(?) right into a scrum of Rosenberry, Trusty, and a couple of Timbers.  Two lucky deflections put the ball right where it can be knocked home.  The defense was good enough, until it wasn't.
• In the end our best players were on the field when it mattered, Portland was down their best player (Blanco) and the Timbers made the play when they needed to.  Hat-tip to them, now go out and kick FSL up and down the pitch.
• Huge shout out to the fans and the Front Office.  I think its fair to say every Rapids fan raised an eyebrow when we heard that we were hosting on Thanksgiving.  A team that has historically struggled with attendance hosting on a major holiday?  But everyone came through in a big way, the stands were (nearly) full and loud.
• An additional round of applause to the C38 tailgate crew.  Back when I was legitimately part of the tailgate organizers we pulled off some big tailgates (Snow Clasico!) but nothing like this.  A full Thanksgiving dinner for what was probably closer to 1000 people.  An epic level of tailgating that may never be topped.

Now that the season is done we'll go through our normal post-season coverage.  Who should stay, who should go.  Re-visting my predictions.  And of course we have an expansion draft as well.  Plus the schedule should come out before Christmas and we'll have the CCL draw on Dec. 15th.  I expect things to calm down over the holidays before a quick ramp-up to the season in January and February.

Man of the Match: Danny Wilson.  If there was any single highlight for the Rapids it was Wilson clearing a shot off the line.  Overall though everyone played pretty equally.