It's been about 45 hours since the Sounders' embarrassing draw with Dallas, but the pain remains. What happened?

On Friday, I indentified three goals for the game: do get red cards, manage the heat, and don't get cocky.

The Sounders managed with the first--our Archilles heal so far--but lousy officiating still gave Dallas an equalizer, not to mention that it was past the supposed injury time and it was offsides. But I always thought that blaming the officials for losing (or not winning, as the case may be) was poor sportsmanship. Besides, there are plenty of other reasons we fared so horribly.

Second, the heat: I noted that Saturday's temperature in Dallas was the same as it was in Seattle. What I failed to note, though, is that an unseasonably cool 67 in Dallas is a freakishly hot day for Seattlites. Soccer players here tend to get accustomed to the perpetual 50-ish degrees; once it hits 65, we melt. With little time to acclimatize to the sweltering heat, we managed only 45 minutes. As soon as the second half started, we melted and more.

Third, and most importantly: attitude. We were supposed to keep our cool going in against bottom-ranked Dallas. We were playing without our star, Ljungberg, and Riley, part of our stellar defensive line. We dominated the first half, but the second was a classic example of total meltdown: repeated poor passing and intercepted balls, miscommunication, and failing to clear the ball from the penalty area. And no one took the lead and helped us get our shit together, which is what Freddie would've done.

We also underestimated the fact that although void of "major" stars, Dallas does have four U-20 national players, including Brek Shea, who, as annoying as his Billy Idol hair was, proved he indeed has the chutzpah to match his hairdoo.

So we failed that objective too.

Next week will be worse: a better team in an equally challenging (mile high!) environment, the Sounders will struggle for a tie.