“It shows there is a flaw to the playoff system, that a team can sort of limp in and win it.”

Kevin Harman, Los Angeles Galaxy, quoted in the Boston Globe

Have we now crowned the best team in league champion? Or did a mediocre team that lazied away its entire season swoop in at the end to claim the big prize?

That was an awful game. Neither the Revolution nor Landon Donovan showed up. They were smart. I watched the whole dreadful affair from start to finish.

The Galaxy did everything possible to lose; spending most of the game inventing new and ingenious ways to miss open shots. The Revolution did everything possible not to lose; spending most of the game inventing new and ingenious way to play timidly.

Neither team looked capable of - or interested in - winning. By all rights it should have finished 0-0 and gone to penalties.

But then the most improbable of improbables happened and Pando Ramirez (who taught the Galaxy everything it knows about missing open shots) scored his first run of play goal this year.

And that’s the way Major League Soccer’s first decade ended.

So it goes …

I now have a four and half months to contemplate the fact that in Major League Soccer the only thing worse than the regular season and the playoffs is the off-season.

I am going to tell you everything you need to know about this year’s MLS Cup.

First, New England is the better team. They should win. It’s as simple as that.

Second, Los Angeles has the most authentic tournament player in all of Major League Soccer. There are far, far, far better guys to have on your team if you want to win games during the regular season. But come playoff time (or World Cup time, or some or another important tournament time) Landon Donovan will “click” and magically become the player he ought to be week in and week out. I call him lazy. Others call him pragmatic. I suppose it depends which team you root for.

Anyway, as long as they’ve got Donovan the Galaxy has a chance. That’s too bad because Steve Sampson’s a pretty sorry coach, and it wouldn’t be healthy for the league if stupid moves like the one Doug Hamilton made last year when he fired Sigi Schmid found affirmation in the form of a cup win.

That’s all you need to know. A really damn good team in New England. A really damn good tournament player in Los Angeles.

What’s my prediction? Ask me after the match.

Free money. That’s what the draft is. Free money.

That’s what I was thinking today while watching Chris Rolfe run up and down the field over in Scotland in a rather meaningless (and sometimes tedious) friendly. A United States Men’s National Team friendly. Rolfe is a rookie. A largely unheralded drafted rookie. The 29th pick overall; now a national team hopeful.

Chicago got him for nothing. And he’s not the only one they got. The majority of starters on the field during the Fire’s epic win over DC United a few weeks back were draftees, indeed three were rookies.

Jim Curtin was the old man in the back. From the 2003 draft were Logan Pause and Nate Jaqua. And then there were the rookies: Segares, Stewart, and Rolfe. Another rookie, Chad Barrett came in with twenty minutes to go.

A lot of teams waste draft picks, some quite famously go through entire seasons hardly playing their drafted rookies. It’s a foolish thing to do. It’s a lazy thing to do. It’s possible to build the core of an MLS team from the draft alone, but it takes some homework, some hard work, and more than a little luck.

And perhaps more than any other team in recent memory the Chicago Fire proved that this year. Yes, they have their veterans and their international acquisitions, but that’s not where team’s are built in MLS. Thiago is nice, but he’s not a team unto himself. Guys like Curtin and Pause and Segares make a team; the kind of guys you get in the draft make a team.

It is perhaps no coincidence that last week Chicago fell 1-0 to the New England Revolution - a team that on that day started six draftees, two of them rookies.

Free money. Don’t turn down free money.

I suppose we will never know if the rumor reported by Jack Bell in the New York Times was actually true. But when I learned on Tuesday that the MetroStars might be considering the venerable Bora Milutinovic for the position of head coach I said “No, that can’t be. That’s too good to be true!”

Bora and the MetroStars. A super coach for the SuperClub. I believe the word is kismet.

Let’s face it. What Major League Soccer needs is a bit of show-business, a bit of pizzazz. And nothing screams lights, camera, action louder than Mr. Sexy Football himself, Bora Milutinovic. At long last it seemed the Metros were getting themselves on the right track. I knew next year it’d be MetroStars Playoff Fever for certain! Hell, I even thought, if they were really lucky, they might even make the 2006 playoffs.

I know. I know. Bora made some questionable decisions in the center of defense during the 1994 World Cup. Sure, Balboa was fine, but that other guy? Oy vey! But everyone makes mistakes. Was that really any reason for Alexi Lalas to deny him another chance to lead the MetroStars?

And so what if Bora was a disastrous coach for the Metros back in 1999? It’s not like it couldn’t have been worse. I mean, the Metros did win seven games that year. Well, OK, three of those were “shootout” wins. Still, don’t forget their gentleman’s fifteen points was better than the 2001 Mutiny’s lowly fourteen.

You can only imagine my shock and disappointment when I awoke Wednesday morning to read that Lalas & Company had chosen to stick with that Maurice fellow. It was the safe choice, the conservative choice. Some might even call it a sensible and intelligent choice. At any rate, it was for the Metros an uncharacteristic choice.

Rather than rolling the dice and taking the (fool’s) gamble on the greatest Serbian-born coach ever in Major League Soccer, Lalas went with the guy who actually had a reasonable chance of leading the team to something resembling respectablity.

RotMasters of old, please come back. I miss you already.

October 20, 2002 was a very bad day. Before then I had nothing much against the New England Revolution. They were just another team in Major League Soccer, a sort of Kansas City Wizards of the northeast.

Then it happened, an event that instilled in me an unmatched antipathy for the Revs, an antipathy that has been festering in a dark and bitter crevice in my heart ever since they allowed Carlos Ruiz to score the game winning goal in the 2002 MLS Cup.

As I see it there is a certain order to the Major League Soccer universe, and part of that order requires the Los Angeles Galaxy to be the great team that always loses the big game. Make no mistake. In our little MLS pond the big game is the MLS Cup, and until 2002 the Galaxy had always lost the big game. DC United beat them in 1996 and 1999. San Jose beat them in 2001. The Revolution should have beaten them in 2002. It would have been the right thing to do.

But no, the Revs had to occasion the cosmic hiccup that was Carlos and Cobi hoisting the Alan I. Rothenberg trophy.

Nothing will ever make up for that debacle. But if the Revs win this year at least they won’t compound their original failure.