So, that half-baked experiment in live-blogging Saturday's game ended right around the instant Time Warner finally picked up the phone (was it only an hour's worth of the "Seedy Cinemax Soft Porn Sax Grooves" CD I heard?) and activated Direct Kick for me. TV and computer are rooms apart here at Metrologist World Headquarters, and I wasn't up to running back and forth for yous, when I could be sprawled on the couch with something greasy and fattening. Wouldn't have been such a problem if MLS HQ types weren't so predictably asleep at the switch, or should I say, half-soused on gratis RB & vodkas in the swamp Stadium Club, safe in the knowledge that some short-straw-drawing sophomore intern was ready for any contingency. But it's just as well. Some things - and Matchtracker is right at the top of that list, as we were finding out - just don't lend themselves to the cheap snarkiness that is the strength of the mode. While other things - ex-player color commentators on regional sports networks, fat kids in crowd shots, Joey Franchino, Sigi Schmid, and Jack Edwards - positively cry out for it.


I wasn't there for this first home opener under the new regime, so my willingness to deliver uninformed comment aside, I can't say much about how it all came off. A success? A disappointment? Something in between? A little of each, I'm imagining. Talked to two friends and long-time supporters later in the evening, and they said somewhat different things; in two nutshells:
"There were thousands of people there for Shakira/the hoopla, who couldn't have cared less/known less about the team and the game."
Contrast with:
"I came in expecting the worst, but none of the outside spectacle effected my experience at all...I didn't care about it, but it was easy for me to ignore."
So there you have it. More game recap comments on the usual boards, running the gamut.

***

"The idea of the eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?" - Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

We wonder, Milan. We also wonder: will a 0-0 draw marked only by quasi-medieval brutality in the midfield inspire many of those 35,000 tire-kickers to come back sometime? Well, if nothing else, it probably wasn't the downer a 1-0 loss on a slapstick own-goal would have been. Which is something, I suppose. You know what I was thinking around the 70th minute, because you were thinking it too; it can only be a matter of time now.
It can only be a matter of time.
The expectant first-night crowd inaugurating another bright new age of NYC soccer, the same opponents from up the road....it was all set up to be so grotesquely, yet symmetrically perfect.
This doomed fatalism is the most reliable part of the Metro fan mentality, if not the Metro fan mentality itself. If you weren't making mental bets on which one of our guys was slipping on the Nicola Caricola mask around minute 87, you just aren't a Metro fan. Knowing it would have brightened your evening about as much as the dog vomiting on the sofa, didn't you almost want to see it happen?