It was a remarkable first season for St. Louis City SC. So often in sports, teams are fueled by the idea that no one believes in them, and this expansion side had plenty of fuel. Finding an MLS expert that bought into manager Bradley Carnell's squad ahead of the year was next to impossible.
St. Louis proved everyone wrong, topping the Western Conference with 17 wins, more than any expansion team in the league's history. It scored 62 goals, more than all but two teams in the league, and entered the playoffs with homefield advantage.
STL did not take advantage of the sell-out crowd at CityPark, however. Sporting Kansas City scored the final three goals of the opening match of their best-of-three Round 1 series on Sunday to earn a 4-1 win, demonstrating just how unrelenting St. Louis' Missouri rival was.
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If SKC can engineer a victory in this Sunday's second leg, they'll move on to the conference semifinals. Meanwhile, St. Louis's season is on the ropes just one game into the playoffs after one of the best expansion campaigns in history.
It all serves as a wake-up call to anyone around the Arch City organization who thought the playoffs were going to be as comfortable as the regular season.
There is little postseason experience in this St. Louis team. Their most important players are imports to the league, understandably without any previous taste of the MLS Cup playoffs. Goalkeeper Roman Bürki, forward João Klauss and midfield playmaker Eduard Löwen all joined from the Bundesliga.
Even some of the players with MLS experience haven't played into the postseason too often. Former Vancouver Whitecaps defender Jake Nerwinski was in his fourth-ever playoff game on Sunday, while nine-year veteran Tim Parker played his 12th.
"You have to take inventory with the team that you have. How many guys have been in the playoffs? How many guys understand what playoffs are?" Sporting Kansas City manager Peter Vermes said on Sunday after his team's triumph. "A lot of times you have got foreign players that come in, they've never been through anything like this so it's completely different for them. There's this educational process that you go through with a bunch of those guys."
It's not that the format is so dense that players can't figure out what they need to do (although the league doesn't make it easy on participants or viewers), it's that especially after a long regular season without elevated stakes, players may not be able to flip a switch and find the intensity Sporting have been playing with since the summer. This is a team whose playoffs hopes were more like a dream than a guarantee.
For Vermes, the desperation his players felt not knowing whether they'd be able to get into the playoffs and then coming through a Wild Card game against the San Jose Earthquakes helped set the right tone for the playoff opener against the regional rival.
"We have got to play a team that has had good rest and hasn't gone through that emotional roller coaster," Vermes said. "They've known they've been in for quite some time. It was a big performance by our guys.
"I really think that has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of those guys got experience all throughout the season."
While St. Louis racked up plenty of wins during the regular season, few of them were in situations in which the team had to win. It is not rare to see an MLS team get hot at the right time, sneak into the playoffs with a subpar seed, and go on a run to the MLS Cup final or even lift the trophy.
This season, with the playoffs ballooning to nine teams from each conference, it is even easier for a squad to sleepwalk through the first portion of the campaign (SKC didn't win any of their first 10 matches) and to click into gear late (SKC won six of their last nine to earn the Wild Card place). The momentum from their Wild Card win, while the top seeds have long waits for their games, may only have helped SKC surprise the team from the other side of the Show Me State.
There are format concerns to go around, but everyone knew what the playoffs would look like before they started. One team was ready for the intensity, the stakes. The other was the one who had been taking care of business throughout the regular season.
With an experienced team that knows each other well, playing with their backs against the wall for the past several months, Vermes engineered a dream opening game and now sits one win away from ending St. Louis's superb campaign with a reminder to the newcomers that the regular season is one thing, the MLS Cup playoffs are another.