“It wasn’t the kind of second half we wanted to have,” admitted captain Davy Arnaud.” If we’re going to be honest with ourselves, we weren’t in the second half, it was our worst half of the year, I would say, but we still came out with three points and in MLS you have to grind out results sometimes. That’s just the way it is. At the end of the day we leave with another win.

The Montreal Impact finished its initial MLS season with a meagre harvest of nine points on the road. The team returns home after this season’s first two matches on the west coast with six points in pocket, having already matched 2012’s total of a pair of wins on enemy turf.

Goalkeeper Maxime Crepeau, who just returned to the Impact after playing in goal for Canada's U-20 team at the CONCACAF Championships, has been moved from the Academy to the senior team.

Mike Magee, who scored three times Sunday in that win over Chicago, won in a landslide in the first ballot of the season for the members of the North American Soccer Reporters.

The Montreal Impact walked onto the pitch at Seattle’s Century Link Field and, in front of almost 39,000 of the most rabid fans in MLS, handed their hosts a 1-0 defeat, signalling to the rest of the league that the sophomore version of the club might bear very little resemblance to last season’s inaugural edition.

“We’ll be playing one of the best teams in MLS (Seattle) and there’ll be 50,000 people cheering against us but we’ve done everything we can. We showed during the matches in Florida that we were a good team but Saturday is another story.”

“We’ll see what it evolves into,” Abrams continued. “It’s also a process of learning about teams and the great players of the past. This phase of it is sort of a tribute to these players. They are important cultural figures for our time. There’s a beauty in their movements and in the colours that they wear and what it represents to us as we’re watching.”

Judging from the readership numbers — which spike every time we put up a story about new kits, redesigned kits, anything to do with kits — we've surmised that, to be a Canadian soccer fan, you have to be a bit of a fashionista.

With the MLS season moved up to its earliest start ever, forgive us if we don’t feel 100 per cent totally prepared for First Kick. Judging by the way many MLS teams finished preseason, with tentative matches and still looking at trialists with a week to go before the games count in the standings, a lot of coaches aren’t quite ready for the early start, either.

The Montreal Impact has added two more homegrown products to its roster.