After the unexpectedly beautiful Saturday night game—the weather, not the game—yesterday was a Sunday in the classic mold: gray, stormy, made by God to represent melancholy. Staring out the window was like staring into a running dishwasher. I sat around wondering about what Ben Dragavon was wondering about. Here's a guy (pictured, via Wikipedia) who's 25, who's from Monroe, Wash. and has spent his entire life in the Northwest, who was a soccer champ in high school and college, whose last name is worthy of a Hawthorne novel, and who seems (in interviews, in his bio) to be all hard work and ambition and hope.

It probably seemed like a happy miracle, something organized by the cosmos, when he got called into the game on Saturday night even though he's not on the Sounders' roster—and not only to play but be the center of everyone's attention, the guy everyone would be talking about all weekend. In case you're just joining: star goalkeeper Kasey Keller got ejected from the game early on for, essentially, having the ball kicked into his hands while he was outside the box; Keller's backup, Chris Eylander, is out with knee injury; Dragavon, who is employed by the league, not the team itself, as an "extreme hardship" replacement player, part of a "pool of goalkeepers"—yes, actual MLS's Player Rules and Regulations phrasing ("pool of goalkeepers" immediately conjures the image of a swimming pool full of goalies, doesn't it?)—was called in. Part of the penalty of Keller's getting the red card was that Seattle had to play the rest of the game, all 61 minutes left, minus one man.

So, in addition to Keller, another player on the team (Le Toux) had to come off the field while Dragavon strode out for his Major League Soccer debut. "I'm still just going to work as hard as I can and hopefully things will work out for me," Dragavon said two months ago to the Everett Herald, when the long-shot in question was his desire to get onto the team's roster. Fast-forward two months after not getting onto that roster and somehow fate has launched him onto the field in his home city on a beautiful night—though it can hardly be said that things worked out, given the way the game went down. (Eighty minutes into the game, a second I'll bet Dragavon is replaying again and again, he dove for the ball, touched it but didn't manage to keep it from going into the net, fell to the ground, and then sat there on the field for a long minute. There's a photo of him sitting on the field here. It happened fast, and took a while to sink in.)

"I'd love to have it back, for sure," he told the Seattle Times. (Click that link for an amazing photograph by Mark Harrison.) "It was an incredible experience," Dragavon told the Seattle P-I. "But it turned out to be a little rough." In a videotaped interview off to the corner on the Sounders website, Dragavon looked slightly bewildered and mad at himself, isolated by his error—you know, the way anyone feels when they make a huge leap forward in their career and then fuck something up, with consequences for the people around them—but was putting a good face on it. What a lonely, gruesome, this-is-what-life-is-like feeling.

Before the game, a waitress asked a guy heading down to the field, "Are they going to win?" and the guy replied, "Yeah, they're the Sounders." After riding a little wave of exceptionalism the first few games, it's nice to see the city can handle a loss—no riots, nothing set on fire, no outraged press. Just about everyone's been totally cool, calm, emphasizing the positive. The Everett Herald points out that, with Dragavon's help, Seattle "established the longest shutout streak to open a season in league history" by keeping Kansas City from scoring until after the 62nd minute. On behalf of everyone, Ben: Don't beat yourself up.

PS: Though I know almost nothing about pro soccer—I'm learning!—Fnarf seems to know a lot. His take on Saturday's game can be found in the comments here.