When I was nine, I decided that Fantasy Soccer didn’t quite cut it for me, so I created my own game in a small little blue notebook. It involved dice and a hand-made probability chart. I would manually play each match, taking pleasure from watching the season play out, particularly when, for example, inflicting pain upon an imaginary Jose Mourinho when his Chelsea would trail Newcastle United by a couple of goals.

After some years, my patience for dice-drama faded and I ultimately lost that little notebook. After a recent move, however, I had the pleasant surprise of finding it buried in a box in the garage. Trying out my game for old times’ sake, I still found delight in the random streaks of luck that would determine key results in the season.

For the San Jose Earthquakes tonight, the dice finally fell in their favor, as a deflected last-minute goal reversed the club’s recent streak of disappointing home results, at a critical moment in the team’s season. After having been, from a scoring standpoint, trapped inside their own defensive fortress at Avaya Stadium, the team finally escaped and earned a critical 1-0 victory against Real Salt Lake.

Throughout the season, the Quakes’ luck has spurted in various directions. The last time Real Salt Lake visited Avaya Stadium, they slapped the Quakes across the face with a stunning volley off the boot of Javier Morales that proved to be the match winner. In August, luck came in the form of Anibal Godoy’s right boot as the Quakes went on a month-long run of form, to be halted finally against the lowly Philadelphia Union, in a match that Anibal Godoy, Marc Pelosi and Cordell Cato all missed.

As Jeff Cassar’s RSL visited San Jose this afternoon, this luck came back from the dead and gifted the Quakes their first late, game-winning goal of the season, something they had become so well known for back at Buck Shaw Stadium.

In the eighty-ninth minute of their delightfully strange match, Matias Perez Garcia saw a deflected effort catch Nick Rimando off guard and bobble into the back of an empty net. If the match hadn’t been crazy enough already, Garcia proceeded to whip off his shirt in celebration. “Right when I took my shirt off,” Garcia said, he realized that he was already on a yellow card and was subsequentially sent off. “I got caught up in all the euphoria,” he explained via a translator.

Yet the red card did little to dampen the mood in the Quakes locker room. Having been searching for a win to cling onto any hope left of making the playoffs, Quakes coach Dominic Kinnear felt relieved. “After last night’s Portland win in Columbus if you had called me and said, ‘Is this a must-win?’ I probably would have said yes it is,” he said. “I don’t like addressing the games that way, because there are more serious things in life than sport. But if you look at the standings and whatever else and consider our situation, today was a must win. Like I said, that’s why we went to try to go for it at the end.”

The result did justice to a heavily lopsided game. Cassar’s RSL, despite needing a win to stay in the race for the playoffs, seemed to accept their fate and sat in deep for the entire ninety minutes. The Quakes piled on the pressure from the opening whistle but found themselves frustrated at the final pass all too often.

Shea Salinas terrorized young full-back Jordan Allen down the left yet often lacked options when cutting into the middle. On the one occasion Salinas played Shaun Francis on the overlap, Francis proceeded to lob a ball far over everybody in the box. In the twenty-first minute, Quincy Amarikwa was given the space to send a volley on goal but couldn’t get any power behind his effort and it bobbled straight to Rimando.

Five minutes later, Salinas won a free-kick after Allen clattered into the winger, only for Amarikwa to head Garcia’s free-kick just wide at the far post. Yet to their frustration, they found that one-way traffic could get jammed.

The Quakes’ best sight of goal in the first half came when Salinas got past Allen down the left and drove a low effort onto the base of the left-hand post. RSL, meanwhile, ended the first period with just one single, lonely shot from thirty-five-plus yards out.

Although the proceedings opened up in the second half, both goalkeepers pulled out fantastic saves to keep the scoreline level. First, Rimando scrambled across his goal to block Wondo’s far-post tap-in from Salinas’ low ball across the box. Soon after the US National Team’s third goalkeeper went sprawling to push away another effort from Wondo, at the end of a lovely outside-of-the-boot through ball from Salinas.

However, RSL created two chances out of nowhere and with fifteen minutes to go, David Bingham had to be alert to smother Joao Plata’s shot after a lovely give-and-go with Devon Sandoval. Yet Plata’s next big chance, a literal sitter at the end of a far-post cross, was taken out of Bingham’s hands. If RSL were going to complete their smash-and-grab and nick the win, it would have been then, but Plata somehow managed to scuff the ball wide.

It was the perfect setup for Garcia’s goal. “There was a long ball and Quincy did a good job getting onto the end of it,” Garcia said. “I saw the opportunity and tried to take a little velocity off the shot because the previous shot I had hit flew over the goal. I knew as soon as it deflected it was going in. The moment I scored the goal the craziness started.”

The fates couldn’t have announced their return with a bigger bang; for something else was also resurrected from under trample of feet in the corner where Garcia celebrated his goal: the Quakes’ playoff hopes. Sitting two points below Sporting Kansas City, who have a game in hand but face the Quakes in two weeks’ time, Kinnear’s men can only hope the dice will fall as favorably in their final three matches of the regular season. Next weekend, they’ll certainly need it given Garcia’s suspension and the absences of Fatai Alashe and Marc Pelos to international duty.