You could go a decade as a soccer fan and never see a result quite as hard to believe as Minnesota United’s playoff victory over the Seattle Sounders on Saturday.
It had everything. Early goals. Late goals. A red card. An improbable comeback by a team playing a man short. And, in the end, a penalty shootout that had to be seen to be believed, one in which one goalkeeper scored the eventual game-winning penalty and then watched the other goalkeeper kiss his own penalty off the crossbar.
With the dust settled, it will go down in history as a 3-3 draw, followed by a 7-6 shootout victory for the Loons, one in which goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair scored the winning penalty and saved one himself, while three Sounders hit the post or crossbar.
“I definitely blacked out in the moment,” St. Clair said after Seattle’s Andrew Thomas, the backup goalkeeper who came on for Stefan Frei late in regulation, misfired on his penalty to end the game. “What I said before the game was, ‘Find a way to get the result. At this point in the season, it’s the results that matter, but I don’t think any one of us would have drew it up the way that it happened.’ ”
And it means that the Loons, who won Game 1 of this best-of-three, first-round series in an Allianz Field shootout as well, will play again in two weeks in the Western Conference semifinals — against either San Diego on the road, or Portland at home, depending on the winner between the two on Sunday — set for the weekend of Nov. 22.
Almost right out of the gate, the Loons’ season appeared to be over. They trailed 2-0 before nine minutes had elapsed, then went down to 10 men, still losing 2-1, after Joseph Rosales was given a red card late in the first half.
But one of the things about building the team’s identity around set pieces is that the Loons don’t need to dominate the ball or control the game to score goals. All they need are a couple of chances, from throw-ins or corner kicks — and those don’t require all 11 men.
It was Joaquín Pereyra who had cut the deficit in half, from a free kick. Then in the second half, Jefferson Díaz tied it after an attacking throw-in. Then, Anthony Markanich snuck in at the back post on a corner kick. And suddenly, somehow, the 10-man Loons had turned a 2-1 deficit into an improbable 3-2 lead.
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