Photo: Earl Gardner

“What if tomorrow bring
Sorrow or anything
Other than joy?

What if be wintery chill,
Rain storms or summer’s thrill?

Tomorrow’s the future still!
This is today.

Tomorrow’s the future still,
this is today.”

“Sans Souci,” Columbia College alma mater, first verse

I understand the impulse to look past tonight’s playoff game to the offseason. Trust me, I’ve been as disgusted with the Union’s performance as anyone over the last two months.

Yet it seems misplaced to me to treat tonight’s game — something that few predicted at the start of the year, something happening for only the second time in the Union’s short, star-crossed history — as an event not even worth paying attention to, in favor of speculating about the next iteration of the Union.

Do I think the Union are going to get killed tonight? It’s certainly more likely than not. Toronto is playing at home, beat the Union twice in the last two months, and has the best player in MLS and the captain of the USMNT on their team.

Meanwhile, the Union have looked like the soccer equivalent of a chicken with its head cut off for the last two months.

But there’s a funny thing about chickens with their heads cut off. Sometimes they stay alive.

Last year, I watched a fascinating documentary on Netflix called The Natural History of the Chicken. The movie tells the story of different chickens from history, which is exactly as insane a premise as it sounds. Seriously, go watch this thing.

Anyway, one of the stories is about a chicken who accidentally gets his head cut off. (Or maybe it was intentional. I don’t know, I’m not a chicken.) Despite lacking a head, the chicken stayed alive. And what a life it lived! For eighteen months after its untimely decapitation, Mike the Headless Chicken stayed alive and became one of the most famous chickens in the world.

The Union are like Mike the Headless Chicken. There is no question that their form has been dreadful over the last two months, even worse than my form at any type of structured dancing. You might even suggest that the absence of Vincent Nogueira has left this team headless for the last four months.

But they’re not dead. They’re not. Rail about the goofy rules of MLS however much you want, but they’re the rules, and we knew about them from the first day of the season. In the preseason roundtable, six of the nine PSP writers surveyed (including yours truly!) believed that this team would not make the playoffs. And yet here they are for the first time in half a decade, just 90 minutes of soccer away from one more match at Talen Energy Stadium.

If they can stay alive, if they can capture even a bit of magic, anything is possible. Remember, the Union’s last point of the season came against Toronto at BMO Field, in a game they probably should have won! Beating Toronto is not outside the realm of possibility.

The offseason, like every offseason, will be interesting. I don’t know what’s going to happen. No one does. But it doesn’t matter yet, because the 2016 Union have at least one more game to play. Are Union fans so tortured that we can’t even enjoy an opportunity when we get it?

I went to college at Columbia, home of one of the worst football teams in the history of football. Since I started undergrad, that team has won exactly 12 games in seven years, set against 54 losses. It’s a painful experience almost every week to sit through this poor squad getting destroyed by the likes of St. Francis University or Cornell. The Lions have not won the Ivy League in 55 years, a streak that does not seem like it’s going to end in my lifetime.

But there’s a couplet in the college alma mater, written at the turn of  the century, that I always think about at the beginning of each game: “Though we tomorrow die / this is today.” It reminds me that, at least in sports, there is always hope. Always.

This iteration of the Union will die and the future will come. And with it will come change, players leaving the Union and players joining, coaches coming and going, the name of the stadium by the river mutating to match the corporate entity holding the naming rights.

That’s for tomorrow, though. The Union aren’t dead. This is today. Today, there’s a soccer game on a field in Canada.

Maybe it’s one last toast to a roller coaster of a season.

But it might instead be the start of something special.