PORTLAND TIMBERS 2 Fanendo Adi 24 (pk), Sebastian Blanco 70
CHICAGO FIRE 2 Arturo Alvarez 34, Brandon Vincent 61
Look, no one promised transcendence. Sometimes the football is just the football.
The Chicago Fire steamrolled into Providence Park as the newly-anointed hotness in MLS, their general excellence over the last six weeks broken into the mainstream by a pair of 4-0 beatdowns in the last 10 days. It wasn’t just the scorelines that drove the narrative, though - it was the manner of the victories, the combination of technically excellent touches and swaggering tactical domination that turned heads.