A fish.

Giovinco scored and I saw a great fish, sounding and receding into the deep as Patrick Vieira slipped over the gunwale with his gaff glinting in the sun and then slipping from his hands. Then there was a splash and the fish had gone.

There are some battles that you have won by losing them. Let me explain what I mean.

The ninth chapter of Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream is set entirely on board the narrator’s boat. He has with him his three young sons and a dockhand, named Eddy. Early in the day, Thomas’s most energetic son David hooks a marlin while seated on a fishing seat bolted to the deck. The ensuing battle skewers The Old Man and the Sea and buries it under six feet of fresh sod.

David spends the rest of the day hooked into the marlin, living with its rhythms as Thomas tacks to and fro to follow its pattern. They are trying to tire it, beat it into submission by sheer will and find the gate that will unlock its end. It is hours. By the end, David is blistered by the sun’s brutality, chaffed by the marlin’s runs and browbeaten by the task at hand.

He never wavered. It wasn’t enough. The fish escaped.

After being consoled for losing the fish, David enters into a brief discussion about the day’s events with his brother Andrew and his father’s friend, Roger Davis. This scene has never really left me, and I could not escape its claws when I watched Giovinco bring Toronto FC level with NYCFC at 2-2 and then heard Patrick Vieira speak about it afterward.

“Well,” David said with his eyes tight shut. “In the worst parts, when I was the tiredest I couldn’t tell which was him and which was me.”

“I understand,” Roger said.

“Then I began to love him more than anything on earth.”

“You mean really love him?” Andrew asked.

“Yeah. Really love him.”

“Gee,” said Andrew. “I can’t understand that.”

“I loved him so much when I saw him coming up that I couldn’t stand it,” David said, his eyes still shut. “All I wanted was to see him closer.”

“I know,” Roger said.

“Now I don’t give a shit I lost him,” David said. “I don’t care about records. I just thought I did. I’m glad that he’s all right and that I’m all right. We aren’t enemies.”

“I’m glad you told us,” Thomas Hudson said.

“Thank you very much Mr. Davis, for what you said when I first lost him,” David said with his eyes still shut.

Thomas Hudson never knew what it was that Roger had said to him.

Here are David Villa’s words after NYCFC surrendered a 2-0 lead to TFC on Sunday in a game that ended 2-2.

“When we’re up 2-0 we weren’t looking for the tie. We were looking for the win,” NYCFC captain David Villa said. “If we hadn’t made the error at [2-0] we would have walked away with the win. We would have liked it to end in a different way, but we’re not disappointed in how it ended.”

This is how you spend the day strapped to the chair, a reel spooling out before you and the marlin cresting and dropping into the black and cresting again. This is Vieira trying. More importantly, this is trusting yourself and your implements and your back to not break in the effort. And if the fish dives into the beyond and the line snaps and you never see it again, it is also trusting that your effort was good. And that there are other fish.

This is so damn beautiful.

In 2015, NYCFC was leaky because Jason Kreis was frantically holding onto a palm-slicing line that was always leaving him. There is little question Kreis was jettisoned far too early, a victim of a somewhat myopic vision that was always a bit too global for its own good. But that does not also mean that hiring Vieira was bad, and foreign coaches tend to be the first to innovate.

Kreis wanted 2015 NYCFC to be 2007 Real Salt Lake, and this was his first mistake. There was the diamond and the four-across and the two strikers and all of it. Problem was, there was no shielding Beckerman or in-their-prime Morales and Rimando. And people forget, Eddie Pope played 27 matches in Kreis’s first year in Sandy, and he played more games in 2007 than he had in nine years. NYCFC of 2015 had Andrew Jacobson and Jason Hernandez. We will miss you, Mr. Kreis.

Vieira strapped himself to the chair the minute he stepped on board, and for this I believe he is guiding us into some new momentary dawn in MLS. In the grand scheme MLS is where coaches go to sit on their ambition. Not in any career sense, but tactically I mean.

There is no league like it, and its parity is a fearmonger. Askew nails are punched into the wood by a hammer fed power and speed and ferocity by the salary cap’s restrictiveness. There is a reason that Caleb Porter abandoned himself for the style of soccer his teams now promote. The Timbers have become eminently less watchable since the fear became him at the end of 2014 and his silk was slashed by this new steel. Now, Portland is direct, and Portland wins championships. It suddenly is gauche to wonder if Porter could have won something playing a style that was not influenced by Jose Mourinho and instead by something greater. We will never know. Another MLS ideology is pressed into the pillow until it no longer breathes.

In one weekend, the Colorado Rapids beat the LA Galaxy 1-0, Real Salt Lake beat Seattle 1-0, Philadelphia beat Columbus 2-1, San Jose beat Portland 2-1 and Houston beat FC Dallas 5-0. In all five cases, a team that missed the playoffs the year before in one of the most forgiving postseason systems on earth beat a playoff team from 2015. Including both finalists. In Houston’s case, it gave arguably the most talented team in the league a shellacking worthy of Bayern Munich vs. Shrewsbury.

No wonder there has been more clinging to convention than experimentation. The league is a die roll.

Coaching in MLS has historically been safe. Vieira is not safe. And this is precisely because he is not afraid of the marlin, of what could happen if it slips the line and falls into the black forever. He speaks like a man who has lost the battle and knew he waged it in such a way that there was no cowing to its aftermath. This is beautiful, in its own way. And it is an anomaly here.

All good coaches adjust. The bankrupt ones become someone else. And if there is any canvas in the world upon which to spill your experimental ink, there has never been a better one than MLS.

Vieira’s 3-6-1 (?) is remarkably vertical, but not in the way we’ve come to understand the term in American phraseology. I think the Gegenpress ideal hit the U.S. harder than Tiki Taka, which is, at its core, fundamentally more at odds with how Americans play soccer. But Gegenpress was the sleek cat under our nose the entire time, the shadow following us on our blunt midnight forays upfield. It is fast but calculating, direct but not necessarily tuned up for the long ball. It is a subtly brilliant iPhone app that makes you wonder how did I not think of this first?

Vieira’s formation is not Gegenpress, but it is something like it. Andrea Pirlo will not abide anything that fast, and anyway I’m not sure David Villa is up for it given his past. But it is faster than Kreis, and hot damn if it isn’t a day at the boat races to watch.

And he has unlocked Pirlo, which is another thing.

Andrea Pirlo's 110 touches are his most in an @MLS game and the most by any player in an MLS game this year. — Paul Carr (@PCarrESPN) March 13, 2016

TFC has been oddly direct this year considering it has not had Jozy Altidore and Giovinco is a hobbit, but NYCFC should be lauded for taking nearly 700 touches and out-passing TFC 482-356 on a field Kreis intended to use as a takeoff strip. Vieira has somehow turned it into a playground. There is ingenuity at play here I want you to see.

This is the most typical flint generating fire at the start of each NYCFC attack. Pirlo gathering possession just in front of the straight-across defensive bank of three and turning up to find someone.

And look what happens when his brush finds its mark. Look at Tommy Mac’s options.

This is a Top Gun fleet of attackers flooding the area, pinning Michael Bradley and Marky Delgado to the wall and forcing TFC to play on the break even if it had arrayed every fiber of its humanity against that notion. So it was for the entirety of the afternoon. Unfortunately for NYCFC, Vanney has (for some reason) fashioned this side into a run-the-break offense that cuts the middle out of the equation. Luckily for TFC, it has Giovinco, who is the frequently played Queen of Spades in a game of Hearts the opposition almost always loses.

After the match, Vieira saw the marlin crest, and his gaff was ready and it escaped him. But there was beauty in Villa’s reaction, in how NYCFC was uncowed. There is a difference between quitting the chair to watch the battle escape and fighting it the way it was meant and losing the fish anyway. I believe this was the latter, and I know Vieira saw it. That the course is there and the fish are there and the only thing for it is to keep casting.