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In Nothing's Shadow: The Columbus Crew in 2020

Most sports seasons live in my memory as jumbled collections of moments, and narratives that string the moments together. Questions about roster decisions, questions about form, observations about a given coach’s roster decisions over time, questions about where it all went wrong—that kind of thing. Stitched-together fragments yanked from longer chains of causes and effects; conclusions synced to sample size. Most years, for most teams, the storylines and analyses are what chain together my experiences of that team in that time, and it’s all I have left when the season ends. It’s what I expect as the season winds on. It’s what I expected from the Crew in 2020.

The first moment I remember about the Crew in 2020 is the home opener. I remember the morning of March 1, 2020 as a few bright hours of untempered, intemperate effulgence. The frost-flecked parking lots at Mapfre crackled with anticipation, the air was crisp, the colors bright. After two straight years of Bigger Things to Think About, preseason buzz was back in the fullness of its silliness. No rage, no desperation, no exhaustion.

The celebrations weren’t jubilant despite—, nor in the shadows of—, nor as a recovery from—. It was just a party. A good time for all ages, getting sunburned as spring landed a first blow on winter. It was a family reunion. It was a church picnic. It was eating and drinking and playing elaborate soccer-adjacent games on winter-thick legs and pondering the season to come with the giddiness only an opening day conjures. I kicked a ball around with old friends, thinking about how long it had been since we'd hung out. Reveling in the glory of the day. The dread of 2018, that clung to shadows and corners in 2019 burned off in the sunshine and was gone.

The game itself had the same bleached-fresh shine. From kickoff, a match that was supposed to be tough didn’t look it. The score was tight; the outcome was assured. The Crew were inevitable.

Dazzled, refreshed, and sunburned, I sat down the next week to try to capture the unshaded delirium of the day in an essay. It felt important; it was a milestone to commemorate.

I was revising what I’d written on the evening of March 11, 2020. My mind wandered, and I thought I might watch some basketball while I edited.

I didn’t watch any basketball that night. There was no game to watch. There was a crowd fidgeting in an arena in Utah while the teams were ushered back to their locker rooms, and then to their busses as the season was suspended.

The sun was gone, the dread was back. It snowed that weekend, and I put away what I’d written about the Crew and the sunshine.

***

I didn’t consciously think of the Crew again for a long time. How long, I can’t really say. 2020 kicked my internal gyroscope ten kinds of cattywampus, and I lost both balance and meter. Throughout the first part of the summer, the metronomic rhythms of seasons and days and rituals were lost to my stupefaction. Routines were meaningless, days meant nothing, and everything happened out of sequence. Death, politics and the motions of celestial bodies clicked onward; everything else went to pieces. Even now, my memories of summer come back out of order, tainted by the flavor of the void. Sometimes, on Saturday evenings when the windows were open and I’d just put my sons to bed, I’d sit down on the couch and feel the Crew’s absence as a symptom of the bleak irregularity of everything.

When I did think about the Crew, it was with an emotion I don’t have a name for; a cousin of grief, but lacking gravitas. It was easy to ignore, easy to downplay in a season of real, world-breaking grief that crashed against the pilings of our civilization like a flood tide without ebb.

But, like, I did miss the Crew. I’d seen—briefly—how special they could be; how special 2020 could’ve been for us all if things had been different. I’d seen tired fans emerge into sunshine with forgetful smiles. And now we were tired and sick and cramped and isolated and dying.

A part of me still is, and always will be sorry for the 2020 season that ended March 7, in Seattle.
A player’s physical prime whips by, punctuated and abbreviated by the randomness of injury. A player’s mental prime is even more elusive than the physical—sometimes they never find it at all. And the chemistry of a locker room can’t be replicated; a special season can’t be delayed, reproduced or replaced. Whatever might have been is gone, and we saw enough to know that it might’ve been beautiful.

***

And then it wasn’t gone. Or at least, we were offered a replacement. A dystopian spectacle drained of humanity and sogged with the moral compromise that pervades professional sports.

Like everything that “came back” over the summer, it wasn’t really back. All the things we tried to resurrect returned to us as glum imitations or as acts of perverse, denialist defiance, or both at once.

But the Crew were back. Kinda-back. Zombie-back. Playing-on-a-street-corner-in-Orlando-under-the-heavy-brows-of-CGI-scoreboards-and-a twelve-foot-blue-screen-wall-back. In all of the close-ups and supporting shots, the scoreboards disappeared, and the wall was a barren blue expanse. But the Crew were back. The Crew were back, but Nashville and Dallas were too sick to play.

And as unsettling as that was, as heavy as it weighed, or should’ve weighed on our consciences, the Crew were back. In the shadow of everything, in defiance of everything, despite everything, they were back, and they were dazzling. They scythed down Cincinnati, dancing over, around and through them. They moved in rhythm: effortless, balletic, murderous. Over and over, Darlington Nagbe made a show of hesitating in the defensive third, inviting the press closer...closer...closer, then accelerating away, leaving his markers tangled in their feet, grunting curses and spitting dirt. Lucas Zelarayan, spun, slid and sliced through the defense. The Crew were agile and irresistible.

And just as abruptly, the Crew weren’t back after all. Nagbe, Zelarayan, Mohktar and Room went out hurt, and against Minnesota, the Crew looked short-handed and heavy-limbed. Even before they clattered out of the tournament in the shootout, even as they strained their way through the second half of the game, the outcome was fated.

***

Another, shorter, quiet period of forgetfulness followed that ignominious exit, and by the time the regular season returned, my hopes had recovered. To some extent, so had the Crew. For a while, they slipped by on the strength of outstanding defensive performances. Then they inched by on the grind. Intensified by the pandemic, the same old pedestrian problems as always bedeviled and exsanguinated the Crew in 2020: injuries piled up, execution wavered and the trajectory slipped.

The schedule ground on, and the Crew ground down. The elegant clockwork that made a ballet of the first 150 or so minutes of MLS is Back was stripped to fewer and fewer moving parts until all that was left was the grinders. Mensah on D, Zardes up front, and Artur and Pedro running themselves ragged in between, scrapping, scraping and scrounging for points.

The games kept coming and piled up like past-due invoices. COVID surged, the tension of an all-or-nothing election built into an unbearable peak…and the Crew limped along in the shadows of a collapsing world. Everything began to feel improvised, rescheduled, reworked, and held together with tape.

Questions multiplied. The 2020 Columbus Crew inflicted on my eyes some of the most frustrating, dispiriting, lackadaisical, can’t-be-bothered soccer I’ve ever watched professionals play. Some matches looked like the whole team had been asked by their parents to come help out in the garage a sec.

The Shield drifted away as the team looked on with all the enthusiasm of a mortuary custodian. The lugubrious hohummery that dominated the 2019 season reasserted itself. On the league’s website, pundits questioned whether the Crew possessed the extra gear required to win when it counted.

What counted in autumn for me was that the Crew were a distraction and a unifier of diminishing value. When I remember the fall of 2020, I will always think first of an overwhelming, immobilizing, inescapable, burning, unbearable heaviness of heart. A darkness of the soul that had no internal cause nor internal solution. Nothing to be done but trudge through it. It’s impossible to understand that feeling through the lens of sports. All I can say is that when I looked to the Crew to soothe me for an hour, their hands were almost always empty.

***

Still, there were fleeting, tantalizing glimpses of what had been, and might be again. Returning from injury, Nagbe looked tired and Lucas looked frustrated, but they began to show flashes of their former selves. Artur appeared from nowhere and scored some goals. The Crew won a few games when it counted at least a little, and slipped into the third seed in the East. You never know, right?

You never know. The Crew turned in a surprisingly confident win over NYRB that was both hair-raising and forgettable—I had to go watch highlights to remind myself of what happened, and when I did, I remembered that the Crew gave up the opening goal and Gyasi scored an impossible header. At any rate, it was a playoff win, and not an altogether ugly one either.

Hope flickered. The rest of the East’s contenders, Toronto, Philadelphia and Orlando, went out in a ratatat of bangs and whimpers, leaving an Eastern Conference bracket made up of the Crew and the Teams of Destiny.

---

Teams of Destiny are, to me, narratives cobbled from the exploded shells of older stories. What I mean is, a group staggers along, eking out a couple of points and straining to keep its nose above the waterline, and we come to believe we know what they are. Then one day, with the abruptness of a fairy godmother’s intervention, they Rise to the Occasion and start slinging haymakers and curb-stomping the safe money, and we glory in how wrong we were to believe what we believed before. It’s one mark of the greatness of sports.

One of the marks of a great team, though, is the ability to rise above destiny and crush Cinderella’s dreams. After an aimless ninety, the Crew switched on for fifteen of twenty overtime minutes and sent Nashville slinking back to the hearth, a couple of delusions of grandeur poorer than they’d been.

You never know. Warming to the taste of upstart blood, the Crew waylaid New England, and besieged their goal from kickoff. But for Matt Turner’s heroics in goal, it could’ve been 3-0, but for New England’s uncharacteristically poor finishing, it could’ve been 1-1. It ended 1-0, and suddenly, before the feeling of a season spiraling toward doom had even fully dissipated, the Crew were hosting MLS Cup, and destiny was casting hungry looks in our direction.

***

That flirtation with the fairy tale ending lasted almost a week before the bleakness of 2020 reasserted itself.

Nagbe—the engine and the driver, the physical instantiation of the Crew’s tactical plans was ruled out. Pedro Santos—Wall-E of the junkworld weeks was ruled out, too. It felt scripted; designed, intended to send a message about what happens to upstart fans who think they see the happy ending coming. It was cruel.

Still, I summoned my optimism. I forced myself to expect the Crew to win—I thought that probably the Crew would lean on their stalwart defense and depend on their stars to scratch out a winner.

The many narratives within the season, the many more the season was a part of swelled together from the seafloor and crested at Mapfre.

***

And then, for what felt like the first and only time all season—in the shadow of a decaying world, despite the kiss of the virus within their roster, and in defiance of all anticipation, the Crew came out and played their game in earnest. Maybe Seattle was tired, maybe Seattle was surprised, maybe Caleb Porter just loves nothing more than being forced into a corner. Whatever the cause, the short-handed Crew came boiling out of the locker room with steam pouring from their ears and put Seattle to the sword.

By the end of the game, it was hard to remember that the result was unexpected. Heck, by halftime, it was borderline unfathomable that anyone had ever expected anything different. But I bit my nails and paced until the final whistle.

The Crew in their final form were not the sunny, unburdened team from March, the magical, balletic XI MLS is Back, or the dogged Crew of the autumnal slog. In their final form, the Crew became a steel-eyes implacable machine; possessed by a vision of what lay at the end of the ninety minutes. They tossed aside the limp leftovers of the would-be kings, seized greatness for themselves, and wrote their names in the history of the American game.

The memories of the season and of the game will morph and stretch and become confused. The details will turn fuzzy, then foggy, then pass into obscurity with those of us who remember them. The stories will outlast us, but get quieter and imprecise with time until fiction and supposition fill in the blanks our absence leaves.

But each time an eye falls on the stat, a picture of that night will bloom in the memory of the observer. A fleeting impression of the team on the field and of all of us, watching from wherever we were, screaming until we were hoarse, dancing around living rooms, pumping our fists and biting our nails.

That fading, faint imagining is the reward the Crew claimed for themselves. Not immortality, exactly, but the next best thing. A codified register of greatness that will last until the casual observer doesn’t remember off-hand what else was going on in 2020. A fact of the matter that can outlast interpretation. Beyond the sunlight in spring, the uncanny valley and terrors of summer, and the dragging listlessness of autumn, beyond narrative, beyond context, in nothing’s shadow: champions.