Given how much energy I put into the first round of the playoffs, it's a miracle I found time to talk about anything else in Major League Soccer (MLS) - and yet I did. While he's hardly at fault - I accept full responsibility for my mania - Brian Garrison of An American's View somehow tricked me into floating a proposal for revamping MLS's regular season/playoff format/etc that had as much chance of adoption as I've got of sprouting wings and flying to the moon to eat green cheese. Seriously, that was a fun project that I kind of let peter out...and with admittedly few regrets. Thomas More wrote Utopia some centuries ago, right? And he did a better job.
Still, that was some time taken.
Returning to the matter at hand, though - that'd be the playoffs - it's fair to say I obsessed a bit. How much? Oh (LINK) just a little; though it got (LINK) pretty bad (LINK) whenever (LINK) I dealt with (LINK) New England. Still, they rescued me from my pessimism and that provided a happy moment or two. Surprisingly, all that takes us only so far as the end of the first round.
Interesting as all that was (to me anyway) the end of the first-round produced another interesting story in 2006: late-game/post-game brawls, especially in the Western Conference. Bad as the Houston Dynamo-Chivas USA brawl seemed to me at the time, it was the FC Dallas-Colorado Rapids affair that carried more long-term consequences. Whether or not some suspensions were just, it was kind of refreshing, if a little jarring, to see so much passion among the players.
Here's to hoping that emotion carries over to the 2007 regular season, where the all teams could certainly use it...in a constructive way that conforms to the league's rules, of course...
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