A change is as good as a rest. For the Montreal Impact, that old adage certainly held true as they provided fans with their best effort in some time, coming away from their match with the Puerto Rico Islanders with a scoreless tie in front of a crowd announced at just over 10,000 at Stade Saputo.

Marc Dos Santos quit before he was pushed. The Montreal Impact announced Tuesday that Dos Santos has resigned his post as the team’s head coach. Sunday’s 1-0 defeat at FC Edmonton marked left the Impact with a shocking 2-7-3 record, good for second-last in the NASL.

Ding dong, the witch is dead. That’s how FC Edmonton’s players and supporters feel after they broke their jinx against the Montreal Impact, winning 1-0 at Foote Field Sunday on the strength of a Kyle Porter wonder goal.

FC Edmonton will try and break its jinx against the Montreal Impact this Sunday. The largest crowd to ever see FC Edmonton play at Foote Field is expected for the weekend match-up, and they’ll want to see the home side, currently sitting second in the NASL table, reverse its recent run of form against the other Canadian team in the league.

It was announced as a sell-out crowd of 13,034 in Montreal this afternoon, but more than a few ticketholders found something else to do on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Those who did make their way to Saputo Stadium were treated to one of the Impact’s better outings as the home club played a scoreless tie against a visiting Fort Lauderdale team that had gone undefeated in their last four games.

Jeff Hunt and the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group are preparing for a press conference Monday to announce an NASL expansion club for the Capital region. And, like FC Edmonton, the Ottawa side won’t have any affiliation to another Canadian pro club. That was confirmed by league sources Thursday.

It promotes itself as the “Bank of Soccer in Canada.” And so, BMO has added one more notch on that belt in teaming up with the Major League Soccer-bound Montreal Impact. The financial institution and soccer franchise came together at Saputo Stadium on Tuesday to announce a five-year partnership in which BMO becomes the organization’s premier sponsor when it makes its MLS debut in 2012.

But the Impact looked nothing like the team that beat FC Edmonton Saturday, gifting two first-half goals to the worst offence in the league. Atlanta’s 2-1 win at home allowed the club to earn its first NASL win of 2011, and asked many more questions of an Impact team that has looked unstoppable in its two wins over FC Edmonton this season, and awful against the rest of the league.

Canada is 10-18-17. That’s the combined win-loss-tie (we live in North America, so we’ll put the draws behind the wins in the standings) record of the four major Canadian professional sides this season. Out of 45 games, our NASL and MLS teams have just won 10 of them. And five of them come from FC Edmonton, the new kid on the Division-2 block.

Both Montreal and FC Edmonton came into today’s match at Saputo stadium hoping for a positive outcome. But only the Impact and the large majority of the 11,232 spectators who turned out on the most clement day for soccer Montreal has seen so far this spring,were happy after 90 minutes. The Impact came out on top, 2-0, outshooting FCE 16-6 in a lopsided affair.