With the Vancouver Whitecaps set to host their first Major League Soccer home playoff game Sunday night at BC Place Stadium, we thought we’d look up the last time the organization hosted a playoff game.

If you’re one of those types who believe in bad omens, you might want to skip the next paragraph.

It was Oct. 17, 2010, and 5,325 fans were at Burnaby’s Swangard Stadium to watch the Caps take on the Puerto Rico Islanders in the second leg of a United States Soccer Federation Division II semifinal. The teams had drawn 0-0 in the first leg in Puerto Rico — uh-oh, sound familiar? — and the second leg was scoreless until the second overtime before the Islanders scored in the 113th and 120th minutes to win 2-0 and advance to the final.

Anyways, now that we’ve scared the bejesus out of Caps’ fans, the real point of the exercise was to help paint a picture of the roller-coaster attendance graph of the 41-year-old franchise.

Fans of a certain vintage will remember the boisterous North American Soccer League playoff crowds of 32,000 at crumbling Empire Stadium in 1979 and the crowd of 60,342 for a Whitecaps-Seattle Sounders game in 1983 that christened BC Place, the then-new domed edifice on False Creek. When the NASL folded two years later, it was the minor leagues for the Caps and crowds of 3,000 to 5,000 at the quaint bandbox that is Swangard through the 1990s and 2000s.

Now, after cautiously trying to build a committed season-ticket base at a renovated, capacity-restricted (21,000) BC Place, the Caps have decided to open the complete lower bowl on Sunday. On Thursday, the club announced it would be a sellout of 27,500 for the second leg of the Western Conference semifinal against longtime Cascadia rival Portland Timbers.

“They played it perfectly,” said Tom Mayenknecht, a marketing and communications professional and a sport business commentator on TSN Radio. “It’s absolutely the right move to open up the lower bowl for this match and still have people wanting more. It’s a sellout and that will set the stage to value the tickets more next time.”

And that’s the key question, whether next time is a potential conference final later this month or the 2016 regular season.

What are the Caps’ plans at a multi-purpose stadium that in 2015 has become something of a soccer palace in Canada? A palace, we regretfully note, that has none of the historic charm of classic English Premier League stadiums such as Anfield, Old Trafford or White Hart Lane and one that can’t compare aesthetically with the MLS’s best soccer-specific parks.

Still, the one-time giant mushroom that now can let sunshine in through a partial retractable roof, has had a heck of a year. It hosted nine games in the FIFA Women’s World Cup, drawing 54,000 for a pair of Canada games and the United States-Japan final.

On Friday, the Canadian men’s national team returns to Vancouver for the first time in 11 years to play a World Cup qualifying match against Honduras. Canada Soccer is hoping for a crowd of 20,000-plus, a number that could have an impact on where the next home game — in March against Mexico — is played.

Close to 15,000 tickets have already been sold for the Honduras match without a lot of advertising. That will ramp up next week when the national team begins training at BC Place.