Back in the opening weeks of the season I remember reading a columnist opine that teams should look to get a point or three off Dallas now because once they moved into their new stadium they’d be absolutely unstoppable. The comment made tremendous sense at the time. Dallas was on the road and on a tear.

Perhaps they should have stayed on the road.

But the truth is, even before they moved into their new digs, the wheels were fast coming off the FC Dallas bus. In fact, you can pinpoint May 15 as the day it all started to come undone. That’s when they lost Richard Mulrooney for the remainder of the season. The midfield was never the same without him. And then they lost Eddie Johnson to turf toe.

Dallas hung on for several more games against relatively weak opposition, but when they finally played their first game at Pizza Hut Park they were limping quite badly. Ronnie O’Brien and Carlos Ruiz couldn’t provide enough spark to keep the team competitive. Indeed, often times it appeared that Ruiz was more a hindrance than a help.

Some of Dallas’s problems were self-inflicted. To name one, they have a persistently weak defense. But the other problems, the ones that mattered most, were simply bad luck. They lost some crucial players and never got them back.

It was somewhat fitting that a lousy bit of luck dictated the ending of Dallas’s season. The only reason their semifinal match went to a penalty kick shootout at all is because Carlos Ruiz knocked his overtime penalty kick off the post.

A lousy bit of luck can end your season. And bad luck ended FC Dallas’s season in more ways than one.