When asked to describe how it felt to be part of the last-second goal that gave Real Salt Lake the last spot in the 2021 Major League Soccer playoffs, winger Justin Meram was light on a few details.

“Honestly, it’s like I almost blacked out,” Meram said. “I swear. Because after I did the bike (bicycle kick), it was almost like I saw the guys celebrating. That moment is one that sticks with you forever.”

It was a dramatic play – where with the 33-year-old’s bicycle kick that Damir Kreilach tapped past the goalie – seemed a fitting culmination to a season of chaos. The team with no owner, picked to finish last, abandoned by their head coach just 10 weeks earlier, and led by a coach, who almost left the sport a few years earlier, was on their way to the playoffs.

“We are a resilient group,” Meram said. “And I think this year has shown that we can go anywhere and compete… just with the attitude to never quit. I think you’ve seen that with us throughout the year. It worked out, and here we are.”

But the soccer gods weren’t done testing RSL’s ‘resilience’ just yet. 

Two days before the team made the trip to Seattle – the club that lured their head coach away mid-season for an assistant coaching job – coach Pablo Mastroeni got even more bad news.

“I think I was in the coach’s room, and the trainers came in and said, ‘Albert tested positive for COVID’,” Mastroeni said, referencing Albert Rusnak, the team’s 27-year-old captain and second-leading scorer.

Mastroeni said the blow landed hard.

“That’s life…Fight on,” he said of his first thoughts. “I’m not wasting my energy on something I can’t control. We’ll figure it out.”

Fans and media wouldn’t know Rusnak wasn’t making the trip to the first-round showdown with the Sounders until about 90 minutes before game-time. 

“Bad news today, guys,” Rusnak wrote in a social media post. “Unfortunately, I’ve tested positive for COVID. It’s hard to believe I’m not there with the boys in Seattle, but I know this group, everyone works and fights for each other. I have all the confidence in the world that we will get the job done. I’ll be back as soon as health permits.”

And that was it. 

One more punch to the gut. How could this happen now? RSL needed every advantage to even have hope of a victory. It really felt like maybe, for this Cinderella, the clock was about to strike midnight for everyone but Mastroeni and his band of cleat-wearing believers.

“As a coach, you want to inspire and motivate and instill belief in the group,” Mastroeni said. “But we also know that Seattle, at that time, was obviously the best team in the league. They have fantastic players that plan artificial turf. I mean, there’s so many variables that go into why it’s so difficult to play against Seattle in Seattle. …You know, from their perspective, I feel like they thought they were just gonna run all over us.”

It felt as if – if it weren’t for their bad luck, they wouldn’t have any luck at all. But interim coach Pablo Mastroeni has a plan – and the universe was going to send him a little more luck. The result would galvanize a battered club in ways no one could have imagined.

When Real Salt Lake’s head coach stuns everyone by quitting with 10 weeks left in the season, he leaves the team in the hands of a man RSL fans once loved to hate. And despite his unsavory history with the club, he seems uniquely suited to lead a team without an owner, picked to finish last, and abandoned by their head coach in August of 2021 to an unlikely playoff berth. All he has to do is lead Real Salt Lake to a win on the road on the last day of the regular season.

For Real Salt Lake fans, December of 2013 was one of the most heartbreaking in the club’s history.

On Dec. 7, they watched their beloved Claret and Cobalt lose the Major League Soccer Championship to Kansas City in the longest shootout in league history. And then days later, they lost the head coach who’d led the team from the “lovable loser” expansion franchise to champions in 2009 to perennial contenders.

Jason Kreis’s exit wasn’t completely unexpected, but it wasn’t any less heartbreaking to long-time fan. But maybe more importantly, it signaled a shift in the club that would transform not just the team on the field, but everything associated with it.

“That was kind of the starting point for the disintegration of the golden era of RSL,” said Athletic reporter Chris Kamrani, who covered the team for the Salt Lake Tribune from 2013-2020. “

His first year as a professional soccer beat writers was the year real-estate magnate Dell Loy Hansen became the team’s sole owner. He’d become part-owner in 2009 because founder Dave Checketts and his partners needed cash to bring stability to the franchise. 

But in December of 2012, when Checketts sold the team to Hansen, he gave him one piece of advice – re-sign head coach Jason Kreis as soon as possible. 

Instead, just a few games into the 2013 season, Hansen had a much different conversation with Kreis – one that sealed his fate with the club.

And even though he didn’t know what was to come, Kamrani said a sit-down interview with Hansen revealed how the billionaire saw his role overseeing what he referred to as “a state trust.”

In that interview, Kamrani watched as Hansen detailed his vision for the club.

“And immediately you got the sense …of how he wanted to present himself as the full owner,” Kamrani recalled. “I think for a long time he looked at himself as kind of the secondary owner to Dave because Dave brought the team in, Dave basically made this thing happen from scratch. But Dell Loy footed a lot of the bill. You know, Dell Loy was the guy that basically helped RSL stay afloat financially for a long time. And (2013) this was kind of the perfect first dream season for him with the final just a couple days away. …And he had something to prove.”

Hansen thought he could expand Utah’s soccer imprint, and in many ways he did. But his failures turned out to be fatal for his leadership of the club. 

“He felt like he could do it better in his way, which is what most really rich successful people think they can do,” Kamrani said. “But as, as we’ve seen, the history of professional sports is littered with owners who thought they could do it their own way and failed to do so.”

Professional soccer got its start in Utah thanks to the visionary leadership and relentless will of an NBA executive. It was Utah native Dave Checketts who bought an MLS franchise and decided to put it in his home state. He fought political and financial battles to establish Real Salt Lake, a club that would do what no other professional sports franchise in Utah has ever managed to do – win a championship. But while sports aficionados are fond of saying “there is no problem winning can’t solve”, that turned out not to be true for RSL and Dave Checketts.

Spencer Warne and Lauren Beck couldn’t wait to get to work the night of Aug. 26, 2000. 

The pair was part of a local ESPN radio team that broadcast every Real Salt Lake home game. But in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down nearly every aspect of life, including sports. 

But on Wednesday, Aug. 26, not only was Real Salt Lake returning to it’s Sandy stadium for the first time in five months, the match was the first time any Major League Soccer team had invited fans to watch from the stadium. 

They got to the stadium two hours early and the anticipation was palpable. 

“I took a little video of myself lugging in our equipment for the broadcast, saying ‘I’m so happy to be back, but I did not miss dragging this equipment into the stadium’,” Beck said. “It was the first time we were back in the stadium.”

Warne said they were up in the broadcast booth, windows open listening to the music blare.

“Watching it build up and watching kids be excited,” he said. “And watching the supporters groups wandering around the stadium with the drums and the smoke and the flags. And that’s RSL’s culture.”

They were busy setting up when they started to hear rumors that they might not get to cover a match that night.

“We started to get whispers that maybe this game isn’t happening,” Beck said. “I have a video of the players coming out and kind of congregating on the field. And in the video, you can hear me and my broadcast partner, Spencer Warne talking. And I say is this official? Cuz it seems pretty official?”

Then she turned to Warne and said, “They’re all out here wearing black lives matter shirts. I don’t think this game is going to happen.”

Warne remembers hearing a message over the stadium’s intercom system.

“And that’s when they announced that it wasn’t going to be going ahead,” Warne said.

Warne and Beck realized, as other sports reporters did, that they were no longer covering a sports story. Instead, they found themselves covering an unprecedented moment.

That’s the day U.S. athletes – starting with the WNBA and NBA players – refused to play. It was an act of protest prompted when a Black Man named Jacob Blake was shot during a confrontation with police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Aug. 23. 

This was a first in American sports history. 

If games are scheduled, teams and leagues do everything they can to play them, especially when fans are involved. The only other time U.S. teams and athletes didn’t play scheduled games en masse was after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And that time, it was team owners and league officials making the call. 

Real Salt Lake defender Nedum Onuoha said the players saw what was happening across the country and decided to join the protest. Instead of squaring off against LAFC, the two teams met on the pitch in Black Lives Matter t-shirts and posed for a picture before calling it a day.

“So the whole sporting nation is now at a point where you’re thinking, ‘Well, do you stand with them? Or do you stand against them?’” Onuoha said.  

He told the local broadcast crew that they hoped their action would send a message that was long overdue.

“The aim is for this to be a very big statement,” Onuoha said. “This is solidarity, not just within the NBA, this is solidarity within the sports world. This is solidarity for me as a black male, towards people who maybe are suffering from injustice in this country. So like I say, what happens on the weekend I’m not sure about but we’re living in this moment. Now we’re trying to make as big an impact as possible.”

There was disappointment that the game was canceled, but Beck and Warne said they also understood this moment was about more than games.

“It was really impactful to be there in person and see these players take that stand,” Beck said, “because will we ever see something like that again? Probably not. Or at least not for a long time.”

Warne added, “There was disappointment inside me personally, because I was excited to be there. I’m always excited to be there and watch soccer. But it was much, much bigger than soccer at that time…and I think the RSL fan base is knowledgeable enough and smart enough to support where it’s right. And get on board with things when it’s right.”

But there were some who were not ‘on board’ – including the team’s owner, Dell Loy Hansen. And what he chose to do became a match that lit a fire that nearly consumed the club he’d once saved. The full story can be heard in episode 1.

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Making of a Moment: The RSL Story is a new podcast from KSL that explores what these iconic sports moments mean to us. 

This podcast takes a look at the improbably playoff run in 2021, and how understanding what led to that moment might just change what these moments mean to us.