Welcome to Allocation Disorder. I am Sam Staskel coming to you from Portland, Oregon, where me and my buddies, Alex Abnos, and Matt Pence, both of my athletic colleagues, are here with me ahead of MLS Cup between the Timbers and New York City FC on Saturday.

Guys, I think this is one of the first times that we've done a three-way allocation disorder. Not the first, but one-off. You know, we dabble in three-ways here on the show. So thank you for joining me, first of all. And how's everybody doing? Matt, you go first. How are you doing? I'm doing good, man. I mean, I love Portland. This was great to get down here for the weekend, bring MLS Cup back to the Northwest to ease my like mode of travel. So that was nice. There you go. I mean, it's always here. We'll get into more that. We'll get more into that a little bit later. Alex, we flew all the way from New York. Yes, we did. Both of us. We left, We left New York where we live a mile away from each other to hang out in Portland. Super efficient of us. We'll talk more about efficiency, too. These teasers are really good. The first. Yeah, you guys, I'm a professional. I'm a professional. But first, we're going to talk just a little bit about the game and how these two teams got here. And Matt, why don't we start with the Timbers?

You're a Pacific Northwesterner.

How did they get here?

Tell us about their season.

It's been kind of a weird year for them.

Yeah, I mean, they definitely took like a roundabout way to this point.

I think Diego Valeri was talking about what like a pleasant surprise this was for

them to somehow end up with a home MLS Cup. Because even, I mean, a couple weeks ago, it didn't

feel like it was going to be that way. But it certainly didn't feel that way throughout most

of the summer, especially whenever they bottomed out with their sort of infamous 6-2 loss at home to the Sounders,

which felt to a certain extent like that might be maybe the end of some kind of era down here,

especially because they were looking at a five-game road trip right after that.

It really just felt like something wasn't right

there anymore, but they just kind of found a way to steady themselves. And I mean, they really,

they were super, super good down the stretch. They only lost three games after August. They kind of

maybe fell back into the identity that they had before, which is a little bit more defensive,

kind of shore up those not giving up six goals in a game.

It's hard to win games when you go to six goals.

Yeah.

And so they kind of went back to Square One and played a little bit more conservatively

kind of leaned on what they had done so well in playoff runs past,

...