Spirit make the women's pro soccer playoffs

If you're following Major League Baseball, and you live round these Baltimore-Washington parts (I count Calvert County in those environs), then you may have recently noticed the somewhat epic collapse of both the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Nationals.  Both of these teams appear poised to NOT make the playoffs this year (which impinges on my Undangerous Predictions for 2015, which I need to evaluate at the beginning of September, which is nigh).

This is not surprising. This, after all, is the Baltimore-Washington area, where major professional sports teams don't often play for championships.

However, a usually overlooked aspect of that is soccer.  DC United, though not followed nearly as much as the baseball, football, basketball, and hockey teams, has won several MLS championships.  Makes one wish that soccer was a major sport in this country, but that's at least another decade away, I'd say.    And the Washington Freedom won the women's professional soccer league, just before the league folded.  Typical.

But there is now another women's pro soccer league, the National Women's Soccer League, and the Baltimore-Washington area has a team in it, the Washington Spirit, though it plays in the 'burbs.  The first year of the NWSL, the Spirit, to put it bluntly, stunk.  But they reversed fortunes the next year and made the playoffs (didn't win, though - typical again), but hope never dies, and they needed just ONE point in their last three games to get in.  Though they were playing other playoff teams, they managed that point with the first game, garnering a draw and the point.  Now it would be nice if they could improve their playoff position, but maybe that's asking too much.

As is asking that they win the championship.  Hey, our women won the World Cup, so is it asking too much more for another Baltimore-Washington professional sports championship -- of any kind?


Here's some Washington Post coverage of the playoff run:

Washington Spirit on the bring of NWSL playoffs, but it won't be easy

Washington Spirit clinch NWSL playoff berth for second straight year