ORLANDO, Fla. – What it means can be left to tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the days that will follow. The debates will come with them, and they’ll be needed.
But when the final whistle blew on the final of the MLS is Back Tournament, there was little question what the league’s impromptu competition meant to the Portland Timbers.
“Campeones! Campeones! Campones!” Giovanni Savarese yelled, embracing his staff as his team’s 2-1 victory over Orlando City SC became official.
“From the moment we came here from Portland,” Savarese explained, “the mindset was to make sure that we win one game at a time and everybody demonstrated, game-by-game, that the unity that we have, the maturity that they showed, the way they went into every single game, achieving this has been a huge accomplishment.