Minutes after LAFC won its second MLS Western Conference title in as many years, a stage was hastily erected on the field at BMO Stadium for a victory ceremony, complete with a trophy and a rain of confetti.
About an hour later, striker Denis Bouanga and goalkeeper Maxime Crepeau filed through the interview room wearing gray championship T-shirts and caps while deep into the night fans and team employees lined up on the grass to pose for pictures behind what remained of the podium.
Few teams do celebrations better than LAFC, which will load up the confetti canon at the drop of a championship hat. But if Saturday’s 2-0 win over the Houston Dynamo in the conference final felt like a coronation, that was only half true because the team’s work is only half done. Still ahead is Saturday’s MLS Cup final in Columbus, Ohio, where LAFC has a chance to become the first team to win back-to-back league titles in more than a decade.
“Today’s a huge step,” defender Ryan Hollingshead, who scored the go-ahead goal, said afterward. “It was a game we had to win. So there’s a moment where you just celebrate and you look at the guys that are on the field with you and you take a moment to say ‘look what we’ve done.’
“Then on Monday we get back to work and it’s all eyes focused on winning a Cup.”
The fact that LAFC has made it this far is certainly worth cheering because the team didn’t so much thrive as it did survive this year. The MLS Cup final will be its 53rd game in 41 weeks; no team in league history has faced such an arduous schedule. Along the way the team played in frigid rain and searing heat, traveling to four countries and covering more than 63,000 miles — enough to circumnavigate the globe 2 ½ times. It sustained so many injuries, captain Carlos Vela was the only player to start more than 28 regular-season games.
Read more: Defending champion LAFC defeats Houston to return to the MLS Cup final
“We faced a lot of adversity this year,” midfielder Kellyn Acosta said. “Sometimes different variables get thrown at you but it’s about how you overcome them. We put our head down and kept working and stayed true to ourselves and really had that belief.”
For Acosta, LAFC’s success wasn’t so much a result of what happened on the field but what…