If you slow down the video, and know just where to look, you’ll see the moment when it all hits Matt LaGrassa.
“It didn’t feel real at all; it felt like a movie,” said the 29-year-old journeyman midfielder, who, amid a chaos of post-shootout celebrations, looked up into the carnival-tinted sky over the Sacramento Fairgrounds. “We were so focussed on the process, all game long, through the whole build-up. But in that moment, when I’m looking up at the sky with my hands on my head, that’s where it finally set in.
“It was the deep-breath moment,” he said. “Like, we did this.”
The this in question is LaGrassa and his Sacramento Republic side, from the country’s second division, beating a third straight Major League Soccer club to become only the third lower-league team in the last 26 years to reach the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup Final.
LaGrassa’s not the star of this team. He’s not club legend Rodrigo ‘RoRo’ Lopez, who sent the more than 12,000 home fans into hysterics with his winning Semifinal penalty over four-time champions Sporting Kansas City. He’s not youth World Cup winner Keko, an import from Spain, or even joyful netminder Danny Vitiello, always smiling, soaking up the big moments like summer sunshine.
LaGrassa is the humble midfield metronome who goes about his business quietly. And he leaves his fingerprints on everything good that happens to this year’s Sacramento Republic.
Growing up 15 minutes from those same Sacramento Fairgrounds where the team conjured Final Four magic, LaGrassa knows, better than most, what it all means. How unlikely all of this is. When he was a kid, gorging on junk food and riding the rides every year at the same California State Fair that was backdrop to the club’s biggest-ever win, he never dreamed of a day like this.
“It wasn’t possible. We didn’t have a professional team,” LaGrassa said, still smiling weeks after the game, a passionate advocate for the virtues of his unfashionable hometown. “I’d love to tell you it was something I dreamed about, but I couldn't, because that dream didn’t even exist…”
“When you represent your hometown, I think it gives you an extra little bit of incentive,” said Mark Briggs, the team’s English-born head coach about his quiet man in the midfield. “There’s more desire and a little bit more hunger too.”
The (literal) Impossible Dream
“My phone is still ringing [weeks after] with messages from people excited about what we’re doing,” said LaGrassa, who played that night in front of friends and family – folks who helped him along his rocky road to life as a professional. “So many of those 12,000 people there I’ve known all my life. All part of the soccer community here.”
LaGrassa is careful in conversation. He’s not one to get carried away. But the word destiny pops up several times in the interview. It’s worth considering too. If you wrote this Sacramento Republic-2022 script, you might be accused of overdoing it. A second-division team, once promised a spot among the elite of MLS before having it snatched away, go on a glory run in a national Cup fuelled by underdog dreams and relentless belief.
They beat three MLS teams en route to the Final. And they seal the deal with high drama at home – the aroma of funnel cakes and corndogs wafting the air around their humble stadium.
