MLS is full of cautionary tales so quiet and barely whispered that they dissipate before rising to an auditory decibel level. Who weeps for Omar Salgado? Or Danny Mwanga? In a league that struggles for abiding storylines, there is barely enough room for Michael Jordans, let alone Sam Bowies.

And yet even as the league’s narrative generator struggles to kick online, what has happened to Cubo Torres in MLS remains one of the saddest unfurling what-ifs in MLS history. And it is getting worse.

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, we’re introduced to a young, handsome socialite caught between two worlds: the hedonism of Lord Henry and the quiet, humble asceticism of Basil Hallward. If the latter represents a cautious, structured pathway through life’s burning hallways, Lord Henry advises Gray to throw his caution to the hurricane and simply be, whatever that would be.

Gray chooses Lord Henry’s beguiling unstructured world view and is undone by its relentless, overwrought bidding. With no guiderails he is undone and crumbles under his own weight. It is a tragedy, in the end, that Gray was unprepared to face. And it ended him.

There are acres of Dorian Gray in Cubo Torres.

Released into the unkempt wilds of MLS’s worst-run franchise in 2013, Torres still managed to plant himself in rocky soil and bloom in Southern California. He scored seven times for Chivas USA in his first 15 games in 2013, then exploded for 15 goals in 2014 and was named to the MLS All-Star Game as a 21-year-old.

But more than numbers, Torres was young and vibrant and everything MLS strove to embody in the fading wake of the Era of the Olds. In a social media era where most MLS goals and highlight clips fail to crack 10,000 views, you couldn’t buy this kind of advertisement.

Torres went like this for two years, an Omaha-class cruiser rolling through the Chivas USA collapse with more latent success than any player had a right to. MLS failed Chivas USA (or perhaps Chivas USA failed MLS, whatever your interpretation), but it had a chance to salvage a diamond from the wreckage. Torres, for all his Mexican marketability and explosive high-flying acrobatics and infectious smile and baby face, had a chance at a reset in Houston.

How MLS hung on to Torres following Chivas USA’s death in 2014 in the first place was a bit of a coup. Houston secured his permanent signature from Chivas in exchange for a brief six-month loan. And this was where the trouble began.

Torres joined Houston after six months with a wagon train of baggage trailing him. He’d played more sparingly than Houston would’ve hoped, and he arrived dragging fitness issues and dogged by sexual assault allegations. Those were ultimately dismissed, but by the time he’d returned to fitness, Owen Coyle stood astride the team selection sheet. And he did not like what he saw. And in this we see Lord Henry enter the fray.

The Houston soccer market is a strange beast, soccer-mad through a deep immigrant population and yet largely unwilling to hitch its train to the Dynamo in significant numbers. Houston’s stadium is a glorious monument to the SSS movement in the U.S., situated brilliantly near downtown and surrounded by urban amenities. And yet the stadium is routinely half empty, even when the team is performing reasonably well, and Torres’ arrival was supposed to be a boon to all that. Remember Cubomania? Me neither.

Coyle, who left his post with Houston to return home to the UK earlier this summer, is an avowed pragmatist and, from an outside perspective, one of the most stubborn coaches in recent MLS history. And by ignoring Torres at critical junctures over the last year, he precipitated his demise. Here is how.

If we give Houston the benefit of the doubt for 2015 – a year steel-forge hardened by a difficult loan situation and intermittent injury issues – then there is no excuse for a disastrous 2016. Houston has been miserable for most of the year, occupants of the Western Conference cellar for months and bereft of attacking ideas. That starts with Coyle essentially cutting Torres loose for no reason other than blind, dumb preference.

Coyle switched from his English Common 4-4-2 to a 4-2-3-1 for 2016, and Coyle was a Bruin Guy. With Will Bruin playing the lone striker, Christian Maidana underneath and Giles Barnes and Andrew Wenger pushing width, Torres was seemed surplus to requirements. Even when Barnes and Maidana were relegated to the bench, Coyle changed nothing about the formational ethos and still kept Torres on the bench.

Coyle, frankly, was a disaster for Torres, Lord Henry allowing all of his ingenue’s insecurities to bubble to the surface without the playing structure that would save him. Even as Coyle praised Torres’s progress, he destroyed his confidence by never once playing him for 90 minutes and never once giving a satisfactory answer as to why. Even as Bruin’s struggled through the worst season of his career, including his rookie campaign in 2011, Torres has always been a bitter, half-forgotten afterthought.

It took Coyle leaving town to get Torres 90 minutes under interim Wade Barrett, but Torres’s painting revealed cracks worn into wide furrows by the passage of time spent rotting on the bench.

On July 23, Torres played 90 minutes in an MLS league match for the first time in almost exactly 21 months. How do you think it went?

Torres paired with Bruin – always Bruin – up top in something resembling a 4-4-2, and it was unremarkable. Torres completed 21 of his 30 passes, registered a couple mostly conspicuous shots. He pulled off a back-heel in the box once, as if to dust off the corner of a once-magnificent Star Destroyer downed and then buried under blowing sand.

Torres’ performance for Mexico in his time with the Olympic team this month has been the final punctuation of a sad passage of time. Torres, frankly, looked like a ghost, drifting in and through passages of build-up with his rusted touch and creaky mechanical movement. He did not score and frankly didn’t look in the mood to do much of anything. Mexico was dogged out of the tournament in the group stage in a 1-0 loss to South Korea that Torres started.

And so Torres slinks back to Houston now, hoping the future is better than the past.

There is an abiding sadness in all this, that Torres’s playing time and future were not guarded better by men who could do something about it. In two short years he has turned from an All-Star and the No. 2 player on the 2014 MLS 24 Under 24 list to a bench player attempting to catch his fleeing confidence in a moth-eaten butterfly net. He was shuttled off to a dying star by Chivas, rode it to its point of collapse, was thrown back to the mothership only to be patently ignored for LigaMX matches, and then given to Houston only to be told that you do not fit the dogma here. Trade? Sale? No. Sit down.

If it feels like a very long time since Torres has had a professional champion in his corner from the ranks of his own team, then perhaps that’s not a coincidental feeling.

At 23, Torres’ last 20 months held vital importance to his progression and he was allowed, first by a strange relationship with Chivas and then by an estranged relationship with Houston, to kill that time with fire. And now, spat out by the Olympics and sitting quietly in Houston, the future is suddenly a glass window with a blackout shade pulled down.

The moss Torres picked up over the last two years is only maybe reversible. Strikers are creatures of confidence, and it’s entirely possible he breaks the chains that have held him and becomes the All-Star he was in 2014. But you understand how far we are from those days, and how much ground Torres has to make up to get back to that point.

One can only hope that Barrett is truly willing, as he’s said he is, to see the abandoned good in Torres and give him time. Because time, that fleeting menace, is the one thing he has had so little of in these passing days of shadow.