Ouimette now has five appearances, four of them starts, for the Red Bulls. He’s played a total of 412 minutes. And that’s significantly more minutes this season than — ahem — all of the Canadians combined on the Impact roster.

“Escape” is the appropriate word, because FCE keeper John Smits, making his second start in a row, made two outstanding point-blank second-half saves, to give the Eddies their first clean sheet of the season — in Cup or NASL play.

Coach Colin Miller said that Ameobi is officially listed as day-to-day, and is undergoing a scan to assess the severity of the injury to his foot.

The North American Soccer League 2.0 and Brazil-based superagency Traffic Sports had been joined at the hip since the league was formed by rebel USL-team owners back in 2010.

In a release issued by FIFA, the headline states that the world football organization an "injured party." Basically, FIFA is telling the world that it's a victim.

Off the field, there was some good news as well. FCE’s Allan Zebie, who looks to have claimed a starting fullback spot after making the jump from the academy to the first team this past off-season, was signed to a contract extension that keeps him with the Eddies till 2017. Zebie is also rocketing up the Canadian minutes-played charts.

It’s not often when there are six goals in a game — and the winning team scores four of them — that a goalkeeper is named the man of the match.

How about this: That the mathematical chance of FC Edmonton losing in the semifinal stage of the Amway Canadian Championship — on goals scored in the 96th minute of the second leg — is one in 1,137,777.77.

But, having more teams in the southeast will only serve to increase the travel bill for the Eddies, currently the only NASL team in the Mountain time zone. Just with the four Florida teams, the Eddies are looking at four road trips of 3,000-4,000 km (one-way) each. It’s given wisdom that flying an NASL team and paying for hotels and meals costs north of $20,000 a trip. But Fath told me that, when the Eddies faced Fort Lauderdale in the playoffs back in the FCE’s inaugural season, booking seats and hotels last-second ballooned the costs to over $40,000 for that trip.

FC Edmonton is developing a tragic history of giving up late goals to lose Amway Canadian Championship ties. Last year, it was a 96th-minute Patrice Bernier penalty that gave the Montreal Impact a last-gasp semifinal win over the Eddies. On Wednesday, Whitecap substitute Matias Laba rolled the ball across the goal line in the 96th minute of the semifinal’s second …