The days before the combine are the most wonderful time of the MLS year.

See, the combine is the start of the MLS pre-season and so also the unofficial start of Major League Soccer’s 2006 campaign. Now, you might say the first day of the combine is the best day of the MLS season because that’s when things really start rolling. If you said that then you’d be wrong. The days before the combine are best because at that time there’s still hope. Right now, today, everyone’s still got hope that their team’s gonna get it together and win some hardware or repeat or just not humiliate themselves like they did last season (and, if you’re a MetroStars supporter, like they did the season before that, and the season before that, and the season before that …).

Yes, there’s still hope for everyone. That’s what makes these days so wonderful.

Sure, there have been some trades, departures and waivers already this off-season. But none of that really counts as preparation for 2006. That was all just house-keeping from last season. It wasn’t the pre-season for next season. With the combine we begin to look ahead. And when we look ahead we see before us open fields of possibility. That is the beauty of looking ahead to something that hasn’t yet begun to happen. It’s hard to see beforehand how terribly it might turn out.

These last days of the off-season are a time not unlike those wonderful pre-school days when you thought you could grow up to be anything. An astronaut. A cowboy. Or, as one odd little boy at my old pre-school insisted, Wonder Woman. But then there came the moment when you realized the world wasn’t as rich in possibility as you supposed. That was the day you saw for the first time that you were going to turn out more or less like your parents. I believe they still call that devastating moment the first day of kindergarten.

For Major League Soccer’s 2006 season kindergarten begins on Friday. That’s when you’ll start to realize your team might not be any better than last year. Indeed, likely as not it’ll be worse. Perhaps even much worse. (I mean, honestly, Steve Sampson can’t get lucky like that two years in a row!)

Sometime on Friday evening reports will start trickling in from Carson, California, and you, in your innocence and naiveté will read them. That’s when it all begins to fall apart. Those dreams you have of filling this or that roster hole with a slick young rookie? Unlikely. That great trade for draft picks idea? Do you honestly believe they’re foolish enough to trade him for draft picks? That little glimmer of certainty that your coach won’t, once again, be a flipping moron who pisses away all the your team’s draft picks on a bunch of never-will-bes who likely won’t even make the roster, or at least wouldn’t make the roster of a respectable team? Why do you let yourself get suckered into such foolish ideas? Thoughts of this sort are the fanciful dreams of the late off-season. They are not the brutal realities of the pre-season.

The reality is most of the players at the combine will be, by MLS standards - putting it as delicately as possible - crap. Most of them will stink. Those combine reports, at least the honest ones, will admit that.

That means, as usual, it’s gonna be pretty hard scratching to improve your team directly through the draft or through leveraging the draft.

(Unless you’re Steve Nicol. Then for some obscure reason you can do it fairly easily.)

But for now there’s still hope - hope for everyone.

Unless you’re an Earthquakes fan.

Well, unless you were an Earthquakes fan.