Quietly, it begins

USA 0 : 0 Canada

It is 9:46PM on the East Coast. USA vs. Canada is a game not on television, but thanks to the wonderful world of the Internet there is audio. DCU's Ben Olsen started, but was subbed off at the half. And in the 80th minute, Freddy Adu enters the game for his first international cap for Eddie Johnson. Let's see what happens...

Update: 84th minute. Freddy gets his first touch. In a scene all too familiar to DCU fans, he gets muscled off the ball and goes to the ground to draw the foul. Instead, he is now the youngest player in US National Team history to earn a yellow card for diving.

Update: 88th minute. If Bruce has gotten Freddy to do anything better, it is at least to try and position himself well on defense. Freddy with three touches on the ball.

Update: Full Time. So there it is folks. In a quiet game that even most domestic soccer fans weren't paying attention to in real-time, Freddy Adu gets his first cap. More importantly, I believe that this means that Freddy can no longer play for Ghana. As for the game itself, it was just as exciting as its nil-nil scoreline would suggest. If there are non-soccer fans reading this, that's sarcasm.

Other important news? Taylor Twellman still can't finish. Chris Rolfe gets his second cap. Eddie Johnson's knee injury that brought Freddy into the game will have to be monitored. Eddie Pope still part of the US back four, and played decently if not exceptionally, certainly a better performance from him than I am used to. But if this game will be remembered for anything, it will be as a trviia question answer twenty years ago, as this was Freddy Adu's first cap for the US.

It's interesting, because you never know if an event like this will actually matter. Like Jimmy Johnson's first season with the Cowboys, it was important only later. Firsts are ambiguous like that. Who hit the first Washington Nationals homerun? See if you can dredge that memory out of the sledge of your brain, but ultimately it was nothing significant. Will this be like that moment, a moment of promise, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing? Or will it be like the first shift of Mario Lemieux, which promised greatness and then delivered? I don't know. Neither do you. But it has happened, and for good or ill it can never happen again. I hope it matters.

Update: Morning After. Ridge Mahoney, who is "Special" to the Washington Post (what does that phrase mean anyways?), has a recap of the game, which dces have a nice quote from Adu where he defends his actions leading to the yellow card.