By Jose M. Romero

Fall Sundays in America aren’t for soccer, right?

They’re for the NFL. Maybe the baseball playoffs. And if its soccer you want, the European or Mexican leagues. El Clasico from Spain. The best football in the world.

Anything but Major League Soccer. Especially when Sunday night’s Seattle-Portland match went head to head with the New Orleans-San Diego NFL game and two baseball playoff games.

Maybe the TV ratings for MLS weren’t there, but the people sure were. How about 66,452 to be exact?

There’s no more dismissing or ignoring or failing to mention MLS, though the ever-present critics will find some way to spin their ant-soccer rhetoric.  But the masses of folks who have bought in will grow because pro soccer in the USA is here to stay. It matters. It is the world’s game, with a North American flair.

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By Jose M. Romero / @RomeroJoseM

Way up in the left corner of the United States, a place so often overlooked in other sports except soccer, a 25-year-old newlywed originally from Colombia is coming into his own as one of Seattle’s most beloved sports stars.

Se llama Fredy Montero, and as the Seattle Sounders’ ace striker, he’s leading his club up the standings in Major League Soccer’s Western Conference as Seattle steams toward its fourth playoff appearance in four seasons of existence in MLS.

Four in four years would be impressive, but what Montero has done individually since he arrived alone to Puget Sound from South America in early 2009 is equally if not more impressive. Montero, a slight 5-9 and 160 pounds, has led the team in goals the past three seasons and is in position to win the team’s Golden Boot for a fourth year in a row and surpass his career mark of 12 goals in a season.

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By Jose M. Romero / @RomeroJoseM

For Fox Deportes

Someday, maybe, this game will mean a little more to a lot more people. But until that time, the truest of soccer fans must hope they have GolTV (bless that network’s heart for broadcasting this match) in order to view the 2012 U.S. Open Cup final, the championship of American soccer.

It’s two Major League Soccer clubs for the right to hoist the trophy in victory – the three-time defending champion Seattle Sounders on the road at Livestrong Sporting Park to play Sporting Kansas City Wednesday night at 8 p.m. CT.

After months of one-and-done games for teams from amateur adult leagues to lower-level professionals and all the way up to MLS, the last two standing are the Sounders and SKC. For Seattle, a win gives them an unprecedented fourth straight Open Cup title after wins in its inaugural season (2009) at Washington D.C. over DC United and home victories over the Columbus Crew and Chicago Fire in 2010 and 2011.

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By Jose M. Romero / RomeroJoseM

For FOX Deportes

It’s hard to argue that the heart of professional soccer in North American beats in the Pacific Northwest.

When Major League Soccer placed expansion teams in Seattle in 2009 and in Portland, Ore., and Vancouver, B.C. two years later, the league re-ignited the flame of longtime soccer rivalries between the three cities. It re-established Cascadia – the name that residents of the region gave to their part of the world – as the hotbed of soccer in the U.S. and Canada. Rivalries between the three clubs that began in the North American Soccer League heyday – the mid-to-late 1970s – were rekindled at an even higher level.

The stakes are always higher when the Cascadia clubs face each other, and there is no more fierce a rivalry in all of MLS than Portland vs. Seattle. The two teams square off for the first time this season – the first of three regular-season meetings in 2012 – Sunday afternoon at Jeld-Wen Field in Portland.

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