It's funny – I expected the Reign to lose this one. A coast-to-coast-to-coast road trip on a short turnaround, a whole full-time workweek of travel delays, disruptions, and cancellations crammed into that short turnaround, and a high intensity rivalry match in the space of five days just did not have signature win written in the cards.

I doubt anybody expected them to lose like that.

There's plenty to be said about what was out of their control. The Reign played with leaden legs, played pretty much exactly like a team that lost their rest days and their training to disasters. They also lost 2-0 to their biggest rival while up two players. They looked tired, checked out, unable to meet the moment.

And maybe? Maybe they should've requested a reschedule from the league, given just how unprecedented and out of their control the circumstances were.

But! They didn't. So we were forced to watch that. Some of us were forced to watch that more than once.

And my response to my rewatches was uniformly the same as my response to the original full-time whistle: what the fuck was that?

And yet, though it was undeniably a bad showing by the whole team, I also had...