The Rubber Band of Luck: New England 2, Fire 0, recap

(Guest writer and superfan Juan Dolsh is kind enough to fill in for me for tonight's game story. Juan is an ardent supporter of the current administration, and has a unique theory he'd like to share. He is not neutral. - Sean)

The Rubber Band of Luck, and the coming Fire MILLENIUM

by JUAN DOLSH, as told to, etc.

Has anyone ever told you about the Rubber Band of Luck? (It's not a literal thing. I asked! It's not.)

It's like this: Luck is like a rubber band that you're holding stretched between two fingers. Most of the time we just twang it - we get a little lucky, a little unlucky, and the tables balance themselves right away. Less often, it gets pulled out quite a ways; getting caught in the snap-back either way in those cases can sting. Raise a welt.

So, keep that picture in your head: This is the normal scale of luck - usually a little twang, sometimes enough to redden one's fingers for a few minutes.

Sometimes, though, it can go to a whole 'nother level. Like, picture two fingers like pillars of rock, 15 feet high and more than an arm-span across. Between them is strung some kind of super-band, built by, like, nanomachines or something that can take the way it's being stretched - because that rubber band thing is getting pulled by something you cannot see waaaaaaay off there. If you stand between the pillars of rock, it looks like a perspective study, with two perfect lines vanishing into the horizon.

That's the Fire's Rubber Band of Luck. And when it snaps back, woe betide the doubters! Because a run of ill luck this all-consuming, this powerful, and this consistent can only be followed by a blessed age, when the Fire's greatness under current management will finally, finally be generally understood.

How else to explain this game, tonight? The Revolution unsportingly played all of their talented players, first off. There's no way to predict who's going to be called to the whatsit team or the whositsnow - it's not like there's a calendar, or schedule, or something. So we lost some guys (bad luck!) and they didn't (darn!).

And we really stuck in there, like, the whole time. Frank Yallop drew up a revolutionary shape that was just too rock-n-roll for America to get behind, despite Harry Shipp's adorable chimney-sweep get-up. Guly do Prado was consistently tall. Every third pass or so, the rubber band would stretch a little bit tighter as more ill luck turned the ball over again.

How lucky is New England's Diego Fagundez? His 100th MLS appearance, and he still can't toast the achievement. Lucky! Well, in a general way, I mean. He was lucky again in a specific way in the 46th minute, when he just happened to strike a hard-spinning pop-up ball with an angelic purity, sending it whistling past a diving Jon Busch. New England led, 1-0, but the Fire were, like, totally better, I thought.

Just not lucky like New England. Wasn't five minutes later that Teal Bunbury hit a hard shot that looked slightly errant, which is Teal Bunbury's thing - but Charlie Davies was there, somehow, and the ball just sort of glanced off him and into the net. I mean, those hockey guys try to pretend they mean for that stuff to happen in front of the goal, but we all know that's luck, right? Davies, he's had his own rubber-band snap back; he knows to claim good fortune when it comes his way. So, 50 minutes in: two luckies to zero luckies, favoring the bad guys.

Our guys almost got it done. There's something about the spin, either of the ball or the earth or something, and it keeps the ball out of our goal sometimes. And the passing, too - that gets messed up by, y'know, the spin. The warp. The service of the Rubber Band. For much of the night, it seemed a physical presence, keeping the Fire from completing a pass in the attacking zone. Just freaky, I'm telling you, because this is clearly one of the league's elite organizations, top to bottom.

It'd be easy to look at the table, and be one of those angry bears who's all like "Ooooh, we've only got 14 points after 14 games, and that's the same as this time last year, which was the worst year in Fire history." Whatever, losers - check out the tension in that RUBBER BAND OF LUCK. The Chicago Fire may be 4-8-2, but that's just 10 non-wins of IMPENDING RETRIBUTION which will be doled out on the stunned and grieving heads of those, like you, who doubted anything about current management.

(Thanks, Juan. The Men in Red play Louisville City FC Tuesday night in the Fourth Round of the US Open Cup. Kickoff is slated for 7:30 p.m. at Toyota Park.)