Timbers Win

I watched damned near the whole thing, blinking in and out of consciousness.

Then I heard the crowd erupt. The roar was louder than any previous celebration in recent memory as it wafted over from Jeld-Wen. It rose above and obliterated the traffic noise that hums with a regular cadence from I-405 below my apartment.

Something had happened.

I saw the Timbers were lining up for a corner kick and noticed that the match was in it's 95th minute.  My God, I thought. I'd been watching, but I wasn't focused at all.  I had lost track. The match was five minutes into stoppage time and I hadn't even noticed.

I figured this was it.  The loud celebration could mean but one thing. The Timbers had managed to score a second goal and finally break their miserable tie with the L.A. Galaxy--break their league-leading habit of tying everybody.

Or as is the preferred word amid the odd idioms of soccer--drawing with.

Draws, those sisterly kisses, are the Timbers' curse and trademark.

The suspense built as I waited for the stream to catch up with real time--a thirty second delay.  The corner kick finally lofted up and my favorite player--favorite because I admire his name--Andrew Jean-Baptiste thrust himself into a mass of players in front of the goal.

But I didn't see it happen, even as I squinted to watch the bad standard definition of the stream.  The replays told the story in slow motion.  Jean-Baptiste lingered at the rear-edge of the swarm, stepped around one defender, nudged in front of another and somehow got his head to the ball.

He didn't jump, but lunged, lashed at the ball and it whistled past the diving goal keeper's outstretched arms, nestling into the goal's left corner.

Andrew Jean-Baptiste--say that name and tell me it is not the name of a poet, a Brooklyn poet--tore his shirt off and ran to the corner of the stadium where the Timbers Army reigns and chants and carries on all match long, ceaselessly.

He looked up at them, and they down on him.  Oh my, did they give Jean-Baptiste their love as his teammates swarmed over him like human locusts.  The Army was deliriously in love with twenty-one year old Jean-Baptiste, from Brooklyn, New York, a poet's town.

I sat and watched this, not quite comprehending the mutual, enormous love, the adoration that filled the stadium, because I am not a fan.  I am not.

Except of the name.

The first stoppage-time goal in Timbers' franchise history did not do it for me.  If this game did not do it for me, it shall not be done, Andrew Jean-Baptiste.


TS