The NWSL playoffs are quick and cruel

The playoffs in a 10-team league are a funny thing. Let more than the top four teams in, and the regular season becomes worth a little less — like what happens each week doesn’t matter much because in the end, mostly everyone gets one more game anyway.

So here, in the NWSL, it’s the top four left standing at the end. And on one hand, it takes away the long, drawn-out, “is this still going on?” feeling that comes with so many other postseasons. Instead, it’s just one round of semifinals — two games, total — and then a week later, the championship. Four teams and one game for each, and because if there is nothing else the NWSL prides itself on, it’s parity: the opportunity for upsets or miracles is smaller, the chance for one rough half undermining an entire season’s worth of work that much bigger.

Portland, one half of the first semifinal, knows that feeling well — one bad game or coming out of the locker room after halftime a little sleepy still or a last-ditch goal-line clearance — changing the course of an entire season that up until that moment had delivered on the hope and almost everything else that was promised back on opening day in April.

Compared to the other three teams that will take the field this weekend, the Thorns are playoff veterans. Sure, North Carolina and Chicago have been here before, and Orlando’s too new to have ever really had a chance at it. But for the Thorns, this is (Cindy Parlow Cone’s) old hat.

Sometimes, like in 2013, it goes well. Then, Portland, as the third place team, staged an epic comeback to knock off FC Kansas City in the semifinal before going on to beat Western NY in the championship game to claim the inaugural NWSL title.

The following year though, it goes the other way, the Thorns again as the third place team, this time sleepwalking their way through another meeting with FCKC that ultimately, and without much of a challenge, goes the Blues’ way.

And two years after that, back in the postseason after a season outside the top four, Portland, winner of the Shield as the regular season’s top team, loses a completely bonkers seven-goal semifinal to a Western NY team that not only was expected to finish no better than somewhere near the bottom of the table, but that also boasts as its head coach the man who had the previous season guided Portland to the worst finish in club history.

Since pretty much the beginning of this season, it’s seemed pretty impossible to believe that was a matchup we’d get to see again in the postseason, or at least not in any game that wasn’t the final. Portland and North Carolina have been, since day one, the league’s best teams. But while the Thorns have at least temporarily dodged that bullet, there is still the matter of the team Portland will take on Saturday, and as far as the league’s best teams go, no one finished the season stronger than Orlando.

After a rough start, the Pride managed, with a stoppage time free kick last weekend to cap it off, to climb into third and set up a trip to Providence Park for the Saturday following the end of the regular season.

As far as playoff histories go, Orlando’s is nonexistent. The Pride, in its second NWSL season, has never made a playoff appearance. It’s a sharp contrast to the relatively storied one of the Thorns team they’ll take on Saturday. And without much — or any, really — past postseason history to learn from, there’s only two season’s worth of meetings between the two to point to for some guidance. And even that proves shaky when you start to dig into it.

As far as the straight numbers, Orlando has never won against Portland. The two have met four times over the past two seasons, with the Thorns winning three (twice in 2016, once this season). The most success the Pride’s ever had against the Thorns came three weeks ago when the two played to a 0-0 draw.

But it’s also not really fair to put any of those games except the last one up as any kind of evidence as to how Saturday might go, mostly because the Orlando team that’s lost three times to Portland is one that was Marta-less, and as far as 2016 goes, also sans Ali Krieger, Chioma Ubogagu and the new old version of Alex Morgan.

The version of the Pride we’ll see this weekend, though, is the NWSL’s best team offensively, with 45 goals in the regular season. Marta and Morgan are the most notable and dangerous of the Pride’s goal scorers, but Ubogagu, Camila, Alanna Kennedy, Jasmyne Spencer and rookie Rachel Hill have also been important to Orlando’s offensive success.

All that firepower will provide a tough test for a Portland defense that’s, oh, also the league’s best. Or maybe that Thorns defense will provide a tough test for all that firepower. Portland allowed a league-low 20 goals in 2017, from goalkeeper Adrianna Franch to a back four that features Emily Menges, Emily Sonett, Meghan Klingenberg and Katherine Reynolds.

The Thorns aren’t exactly lacking in the offense department either, with a list of names that more than rivals the Pride’s. Christine Sinclair, Lindsey Horan, Nadia Nadim, Hayley Raso are among the players that helped Portland rack up 37 goals during the regular season.

The big names and international stars that litter the rosters of both Portland and Orlando are a far cry from what we’ll see in the second semifinal on Sunday. Neither North Carolina nor Chicago boasts nearly as much, at least in the name-recognition-to-casual-fans department as their playoff counterparts.

That’s not to say that the Courage and Red Stars don’t have names, it’s just that most of the ones you’ll see on Sunday are those of players who earned their reputation strictly through years of grinding it out in the NWSL, not because they did something amazing in a World Cup or Olympics. There are, of course, outliers, like Chicago’s Christen Press and Julie Ertz, who have had plenty of success with the USWNT, or North Carolina’s Abby Erceg, who’s been a mainstay on the New Zealand WNT for more than a decade.

Mostly though, the Courage and Red Stars are populated by players like McCall Zerboni, who’s never been with the USWNT despite consistently being one of the league’s best players, or Lynn Williams and Taylor Smith, both of whom are just now starting to get noticed by Jill Ellis. Chicago too has plenty of those players, with the likes of Danielle Colaprico, Arin Gilliland, Jen Hoy and Vanessa DiBernardo all essential parts of Chicago’s success over the past few seasons despite not having much of the big name cache that some others might.

That success, specifically, has been three straight playoff appearances for a Red Stars team that finished its first two NWSL seasons always falling just short — sometimes purely by circumstance or tiebreakers — of the top four. The arrival of players like Colaprico and Gilliland in 2015 helped makes the Red Stars a contender at a time when other teams were struggling through dealing with the revolving door effect the World Cup had on rosters.

But for all Chicago’s improvement, the Red Stars have, in two previous tries, never won a playoff game. Generally, Chicago just doesn’t seem to do well in games of consequence, whether it was the relative importance of last week’s regular season finale in Portland, where a win would have secured third place, or the two previous playoff appearances. In 2015, Chicago lost 3-0 to FCKC in a game that was pretty much over by halftime. Last season, after finishing a club-best second in the regular season, the Red Stars lost to Washington in extra time, needing a late equalizer from Press to even force the added 30 minutes.

One place where Chicago has had consistent success, this season at least, is against North Carolina. The Red Stars beat the Courage all three times the two met this season, including once in North Carolina, where the Courage lost just three times in all of 2017.

Chicago, and again, more consistently than perhaps any other team, figured out how to solve North Carolina’s high pressure game while also limiting the damage the Courage’s otherwise potent offense could do.

Part of that is that for all the big names the Red Stars lack, Chicago’s made up for it in playing as a more cohesive unit. Sure, Press’ offensive contributions or the work of Ertz, Casey Short or Gilliland defensively are important. But it’s how Chicago’s been able to function as a whole that’s helped the team make quick work of North Carolina.

It’s also that the Courage, for all their dominance this season, are actually a relatively similar team to the Red Stars. Like Chicago, North Carolina’s success hasn’t come from one player coming in and turning the thing around or making every look better the same way Marta and then Morgan did in Orlando.

Instead, North Carolina’s always relied entirely on the team game, from the offensive threats of Williams and Jess McDonald, to the midfield leadership, distribution, and turnover creation that Zerboni and Sam Mewis provide, to the runs out of the back from Smith and the defensive work of Erceg and Abby Dahlkemper.

A year ago, it was Western NY rolling into Portland and knocking off the league-best Thorns in the semifinal. And it was Washington, also the lower seed, doing the same, and in similarly dramatic fashion, to the Red Stars. Those stories and the teams to which they belong provided us with two of the greatest games we’ve seen in the NWSL’s still-short history.

This year, some of those roles are reversed: the Courage underdogs no more and the Red Stars now the team trying to play out from under the past and years of staying stagnant or almost good enough. There’s Orlando, the first expansion club to ever make a postseason appearance, though many of its players have been here before, including with the team it’ll take on Saturday.

There’s Portland, looking to add to a trophy case that’s already impressive and North Carolina, looking to break whatever weird curse the Shield seems to have cast on winners past. And there’s players for whom these will be their final NWSL games, set to suit up somewhere else, or not at all, next year.

For two of the four left, this weekend will be, too and however cruelly, where it ends. It’s the work of a season and the 24 previous games coming down to maybe one moment; time running out on a season that didn’t feel ready to be over. And for the other two? They — and we — will get to do this again one more time, two weeks from now, in Orlando.

All times Eastern

Portland Thorns FC (2) vs. Orlando Pride (3), 3:30 PM, Providence Park (Lifetime)

North Carolina Courage (1) vs. Chicago Red Stars (4), 3:30 PM, WakeMed Soccer Park (Lifetime)