I was expecting some sort of "Least Valuable Fan" or the "Oduro-Koke-Landin Achievement" award at the Dynamo Awards Dinner
Two points: - This was discussed before: the term valueless is an evaluation of it as proposition. In no way would I equate a long shot with the word "insurmountable." As anyone who has played cards would tell you longshots happen all the time. - Having both wild card winner get to the cup definitely has surprised me. It still may, or may not, be a rare event. We don't know yet. - Nothing that you quoted can be equated to "insurmountable." -- Also, since you like to go digging back into our past posts -- if you go back and look I think you will find a certain downside cosmo posting the exact same sentiments, that it is important to finish 3 or better.
First I didn't dig this up, westside did, I just took it from his post. Second, what I'm referring to is you saying that 5th place is not really better than finishing 6th. Obviously it's a big difference. Had they lost to KC and been eliminated I could have seen how they were almost the same, but the Dynamo proved that all you need is to get in. So there's a huge difference between 5th and 6th. I never said anything about you saying insurmountable that was westside.
Oh, I still think finishing 3rd is important, just because the way the schedule was structured this year - and with the Dynamo having a CCL game the last week of the regular season it added another game in there - the fatigue element was going to catch up to the wild card teams. The second half of the SKC game was proof of the fatigue from 3 games in 8 days. In the current system, the top 3 spots are the desireable ones. But for the Dynamo, a fortunate thing happened to mitigate that - first, the Colorado game was rendered meaningless for seeding (in the East), allowing the team to rest the starters the final weekend, and second, when they got to the DC series, the funky Northeast weather put DC on the road for the second leg and the snowstorm cost them a day of rest (IIRC they went straight from NY to Houston). So the fatigue element evened out this year by the time we got to the conference final.
On paper that makes sense but I think there are other factors in play too. It almost seems that if you can jump on home field advantage and get some momentum in the first game you can carry that into the second game. It sort of nullifies the advantage the league is trying to give the top seed. Also, I thought the same thing that Dom said, that the Dynamo play better this way, with their backs against the wall. Look how poorly they did in so many of their "easy" games this year.