The Seattle Sounders beat the LA Galaxy 2-1 last night at a sub-freezing CenturyLink Field, but were eliminated from the playoffs anyway. How is that possible? The match was the second leg of a two-legged semi-final. The Sounders lost the first leg in LA 1-0, and won the second leg last night, 2-1. This would appear to add up to a 2-2 tie, but Major League Soccer recently adopted the European "road goals" tiebreaker rule for such matches, where the team with the most goals scored on the road is the winner. Thus, last night, the Sounders won 2-1, tied 2-2, and also lost. Let’s discuss, shall we?

• No player for the Seattle Sounders is more important than central midfielder Osvaldo Alonso. That Ozzie was limited to only 64 injury-plagued minutes in the MLS Cup semi-final after suffering a muscle injury in the previous round makes last night’s loss even tougher to take. Injuries are a part of soccer, but my word, why did the last match of the year feature a visibly diminished Ozzie?

• I was hard on goalkeeper Stefan Frei and forward Lamar Neagle earlier this year and I’d like to offer them both different sorts of apologies. To Stefan: We had some hard times together. You let balls go by you a bunch of times when I was first getting to know you. It was hard. But then you stopped doing that. And we had good times together. Those were great. I’ll remember the good times. To Lamar: You do a lot of things well. You score goals, you assist goals. You run fast. You track back on defense. These are all good things. You also do dumb garbage a lot. Like giving the ball away in the attacking third as often as not. This apology isn’t going the way I wanted to. Um, I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve started to notice the good things you do. They’re good! Now stop being bad.

• I haven’t been to a soccer match as cold as last night’s since I was a (very) drunk freshman in college, supporting my roommate. Call me a wimp, but if I were to rate the conditions for watching soccer, I’d put dry over wet and warm over cold. Also warm over hot. The point is, my toes are still numb.

• I was really hoping that would be the last time I had to watch Landon Donovan play soccer. He’s an American legend and all, but to me he’ll always be a huge thorn in the side of the Sounders. Instead it was likely the last time we’ll get to see fullback DeAndre Yedlin play in Rave Green. This all sucks. Let me think about my cold toes some more.

• Hey, fans who yell things like “WHY DON’T YOU RUN HARDER?” at soccer players, especially elite strikers: They don’t run harder because they know better than you when they won’t get the ball, and it’s worth conserving energy for when they have a chance to score a goal, and yes it would be great if they had more energy, but if they did and still had their other skills they’d be playing in Madrid, so shut up, and stop assuming that professional athletes are lazy.

• The Galaxy and Sounders were the two best teams in the MLS this season by a very wide margin. Soccer statistics is a nascent (and according to some, misguided) field, but looking at how effectively teams attack, defend, control the ball, all of the advanced stats showed LA and Seattle towering over the rest of the league. These were two historically great teams (by MLS standards… neither team would be able to hang in top European leagues, which is fine, and not an indictment of the MLS, but is also truth and worth pointing out after using the phrase “historically great”). This all makes last night’s loss a tough pill to swallow. No one really screwed up. The result wasn’t an unfair one. It also was not a result that seemed worthy of separating the two sides. Penalty kicks are a goofy way to determine the outcome of a soccer match, but a tie this closely contested felt like it deserved some goofiness in determining who should advance. Instead, what determined that the Galaxy would advance was the road goal rule, which uses who was able to score more on the road as a tiebreaker. This bit of silliness is also what propelled the Sounders into the semifinals. Also everyone knew what was up and was able to strategize accordingly. The rule is dumb and arbitrary but not meaningfully unfair. That said…

• I’ll put all my cards on the table: soccer playoffs are an awful way of determining a league champion. Awful. No top league in the world works this way. The NFL playoffs work because the better football team wins a football game on a pretty regular basis, and it would be impossible for every team to play every other team in a regular season. The NBA playoffs work because seven games is enough time to see which of two teams is better than the other. In soccer, the regular season works fine for determining who the best team is. Kill the playoffs. Kill them. Kill them dead.

• The Sounders finished this season with two trophies (the Supporters Shield for the best regular season record, and the US Open Cup) and their best playoff performance to date, and so I hope the nature of Sunday’s loss won’t taint what Seattle accomplished. This was an amazing season; the Sounders turned over a great deal of their roster since their last elite team (led by Fredy Montero and Eddie Johnson). On my way out of the stadium I heard someone call for manager Sigi Schmidt’s job. That seems bananas to me. Two trophies! MLS Cup semi-final! Let’s lick our wounds for a couple weeks, sure, but then let's remember to treasure what this team managed to do this year.