When I was but a wee lad, I loved watching the game show Press Your Luck. The most exciting part of the show was watching someone get their last whammy and crapping out — for whatever reason, it was just far more entertaining to watch someone with thousands of dollars lose their money because they stopped the moving lights on a small red…thing. The tension, it was palpable.

But at least on Press Your Luck, you could only acquire one whammy at a time.

D.C. United could have really used that kind of pacing last night; instead, the Black-and-Red experienced an incredibly damaging triple-whammy in one swoop last night — giving up the vital first goal, losing a player to a red card, and having that player be the goalkeeper, screwing up any strategy they had prepared going into the final third of the match — and couldn’t recover in time to defend their U.S. Open Cup Championship, losing 2-1 to Seattle.

It was a tough loss for the home team to swallow.

“When they got their goal, I thought we had the momentum,” lamented head coach Tom Soehn after the final. “It hurts right now. Our locker room is a somber place.”

To their credit, visitors from Washington State came clad in oceanic shades of green and blue, a song in their chests just waiting to explode into the air. Traveling in packs, they sardined into this writer’s Orange Line train, one at a time, 3,000 miles away from home, an impressive cast in support of a team who’ve made a splash in their first foray into the upper echelons of the American soccer landscape. This, combined with the 17,329 overall attendance, made for a very nice atmosphere at RFK Stadium for the 96th annual final of the Cup.

(That is, of course, if you could navigate the incredibly long lines for the discounted food and drink and return back to your seat in time to actually watch any of the game.)