It all came with the rancid taste of rotten luck.
Ryan James, the Riverhounds' most dynamic midfielder on the evening, had just executed an academy-grade sliding tackle, one that should've pushed the ball from peril. But it backfired right away. The first Louisville pass dissected two defenders. The next slid through Neco Brett's legs, then banked off Kenardo Forbes' foot, then became a point-blank save by Kyle Morton, then ...
Well, watch:
And then, the ball popped so high, so helplessly far from the fallen Morton, from 6-foot-6 clearance machine Joe Greenspan, from a panicking Thomas Vancaeyezeele that only the opponents' Paolo DelPiccolo could soar into it for uncontested header.
"Really frustrating," Vancaeyezeele would recall for me of watching that ball. "You can see it going in, and you can't do anything about it. In my head, I was like, 'Maybe we're going to score another one.' But I couldn't reach it, couldn't get it. Really frustrating."
It was the 118th minute, deep into overtime and a few ticks away from going to kicks.
It was 2-1, with the two-time defending USL champs getting the result in his Eastern Conference semifinal over the bracket's No. 1 seed, deflating another franchise-record overflow crowd of 6,073 crammed into Highmark Stadium.
It was, as Greenspan would tell me in the entirety of an answer while struggling for words, "Disappointing. Really disappointing."
It was, beyond a doubt, all of those things.
But here's what it wasn't: It wasn't about luck.
Bob Lilley, the indefatigable coach who's most responsible for this remarkable season, his second at the helm, summed it up with excruciating tact: "When you lose on your home field in the playoffs, regardless of if it was this round or the next round or the final ... you don't ever want to lose at home. Louisville doesn't. That's why they have a couple of titles."
He paused a moment.
"Did we show growth this season? Yeah. Did we have a lot of highs and good moments? Yes. But it's a bitter pill to swallow. Hopefully, we keep growing from this, so that, if we're in this position again, we can take even more advantage of it. We needed to be able to take a hit better than we did."
Ouch. But yeah, that: Louisville was the better side, is the better side and advanced on merit.
Vancaeyezeele's header off a Forbes corner in the 11th minute sent the crowd into a singing, dancing delirium, a scene sweetly captured in the raw ...
GOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLL!!!!! The @RiverhoundsSC take the 1-0 lead over Louisville City! #TogetherWeHunt pic.twitter.com/UYuIjg7A0V
— Chase Williams WPXI (@chasepwilliams) November 2, 2019
... only to be followed by 30 minutes of calm, patient restoration. The champs never panicked. They simply kept pressing. And in the 51st minute, Luke Spencer drew Louisville by chesting this ball down to his feet and outmuscling both Tobi Adewole and Ryan James for an authoritative strike through Morton:
For most of the rest of the match, Louisville held the ball, waited for the right play, held the ball some more, waited for the right play some more and, when it mattered most, prevailed with precisely that formula. On the winning strike, four different players made nine different touches, all clinical. For the evening as a whole, Louisville dominated possession at 67.3 percent and total passes by an astonishing 877-533.
That's no fluke. That's not luck.
Lilley knew his counterpart, John Hackworth, prioritizes possession above all else. That'd been his message to the players through training all week, to stay tight to the ball, to stay smart with the decisions, to not simply fling it away.
For a while, the Hounds did that. But three factors took over, all in a fierce way:
1. Louisville held really well.
2. Neco Brett couldn't score at all.
3. The Hounds wore down.
And the latter two weren't luck, either.
Brett, fresh off a four-goal masterpiece the previous week in the 7-0 blowout of Birmingham that was only the second such output in USL playoff history, paid a terrible price for that in this one. He had, by my count, four superb opportunities to score and couldn't convert any. On one, in the 49th minute, he worked around Louisville keeper Chris Hubbard, stared toward a vacated goal, then curiously tried a soft chip with his left foot rather than, you know, drilling home a dream come true.
That's the scene captured atop this column by our Matt Sunday. And that Louisville player sliding from the left with the clearance, Paco Craig, never should've been able to make it.
I'd hoped to ask Brett about that, but he left the pitch abruptly after the match.
That miss would prove to be his last chance, though he nearly set up Robbie Mertz for a goal early in overtime. And that right there would be the Hounds' last gasp of any kind, as they'd run completely out of gas early in overtime. On those rare occasions they'd take the ball from Louisville, they'd blindly blast it into the air in the general direction of Steevan Dos Santos, a late sub and the only forward left with working lungs, only to see the play reverse right back their way.
It was an awful sight. All 20-plus minutes of it before Louisville got the winner.
It also was, I'd say, immensely avoidable.
To reiterate, no one's earned more respect for the Hounds' rise than Lilley. He's brought them structure, discipline, passion and so much more, both as an instructor and in his role as de facto general manager. He finds and signs all these players, in addition to molding them as a group.
But in this match, he had four substitutions he could have used, including the bonus one allotted when there's overtime ... and he essentially used one. That came in the 74th minute, when Kevin Kerr came out for Dos Santos, who'd been held out of training all week by an abdominal strain. There'd be another, with Jordan Dover lifted for Mark Forrest, but that was all the way into the 117th minute.
On the Louisville side, in contrast, Hackworth used all four of his substitutions, in the 60th, 85th, 89th and 97th minutes. And one of those, in the 85th, would be DelPiccolo to eventually deliver the winner.
I asked Lilley about the lack of subs.
"We always knew it was an option, but you look at some of the seasons those guys had," Lilley began. "I mean, Neco was gassed. But we may have needed him in PKs. That's a decision you make as coach. And I think Kenny struggled, for him."
Forbes, he meant. And he really did struggle. Hesitant and errant in his distribution.
"But he's always played his best in the big games," Lilley continued, "and I'm not taking him off the field. I know what he means to the club. I thought Robbie still had something. And Steevan battled like a warrior. ... But I'll have to look at that. Because you know, we did run out of gas. I'll have to look at whether it'd have made a difference if I'd used more guys off the bench. I always do self-reflection, and I'll look at it."
Once the broader sting wears off, Lilley and company will be eminently more capable of self-reflection on the positive, too. And the list is long for franchise achievements.
Best regular-season record.
First conference top seed.
First playoff victory since 2004.
As Greenspan told me, moments after the players made their final lap of appreciation before the Steel Army supporters section, there was much of which to be legitimately proud, both on the pitch ...
... and off it, where the city embraced its professional soccer team unlike any point in the past. It wasn't just the attendance. It was the attentiveness. The knowledge. The vocal volumes. On this night alone, for the first time since Highmark opened in 2013, the main grandstand actuall made more noise than the Army, and it's not as if the Army wasn't outdoing itself.
"Amazing," Dover called the scene. "Just amazing."
I never thought I'd witness it.
But then, I wasn't sure I'd witness any of this. And it's a testament to all concerned, topped by the owner Tuffy Shallenberger, that the sport's come as far as it has here.
I'm often asked which soccer team I follow. And each time, I'll answer, 'The one from Pittsburgh.'
Crazy, right?
Well, there are a lot more people like that now than there were before this remarkable 2019 season began.
