NOTE: This is the lead feature in the July edition of Sounders Monthly. Click here to see the full edition. It is available free-of-charge at The NINETY, GuestLink Services locations, Soccer Celebration and Membership Central. You can also access it on the Sounders Mobile App. Kyle McCarthy is an assistant editor and senior writer at New England Soccer Journal.
Several months of work boiled down to one fateful moment last July. The decisive sequence unfolded more or less out of the control of the people who worked so diligently to construct it.