Colorado Rapids vs. New England Revolution: Oh Hello, Bad Stat!

You remember the stat, right? Last season, whenever any opposing team scored a goal at any point in any game, the Rapids were a horrifying 2-19-4. That's beyond bad, that's just plain sad. We at Burgundy Wave liked to use that stat too prove just how inept they were in 2012, not that the team really needed any help in that department.

Well, here's something to make you feel better about how the improvement has come this year, even if it's only marginal: Colorado's 2-1 win over the New England Revolution on Wednesday was enough to give them their second such win this year, and that has tied last year's total of wins when the other team has scored. It's not much, but it's nice to see in mid-July, and both wins this year could be argued to be even better than the two last year.

The first of them last year was the improbable win over Philadelphia in only the second game of the season, where Colorado went down a man and played terribly but were able to nick a goal on a late counter-attack. The second was the miracle against Montreal where Colorado got outplayed, but earned a penalty and got some help from the wind Gods on their last goal, which bounced twice on the crossbar without going out of play before getting slammed in by Jaime Castrillon -- oh, and there had actually been a whistle before that as well, so it was even worse a play than we first had though!

This season, we've seen Colorado decidedly go step-for-step with the Impact, a team that was doing as well as anyone in MLS at the time, and nick a 2-1 win from the team with the best defense in the entire league, controlling the entire second half of play in the process. I'm no expert, but I'd give the advantage to this season's Rapids team in that regard. It didn't hurt that they broke a six-game losing streak when allowing the opposition to score first with the win on Wednesday.

Now, we'll see if they can keep that sort of form up through the rest of the month: two tough matches away at Seattle and at home to the Galaxy await them, and it's hard to think that they'll be able to get a few points out of those two teams without allowing at least a goal or two. If they were to get their third such victory away in Seattle -- a place where they've never so much as drawn a game -- it would be something special indeed.