Well, that worked. Again.

After a few cursory coffees with St. Paul, Minnesota United FC is back together with Minneapolis, trading dreamy glances and long phone calls.

“You hang up.”

“No, you hang up!”

It’s hard to blame Mayor Chris Coleman for stepping into the breach when Minneapolis told Minnesota’s pro soccer team it just wasn’t that into it. A Major League Soccer stadium would fit nicely into that Midway parcel on the Green Line, and another major league sports franchise would add to the national profile of the twin city east of the river.

But playing doormat to Minneapolis has become a little embarrassing. It’s one thing to fall short of luring the Twins and Vikings, two longtime west-side institutions; it’s quite another to be spurned by America’s fastest-growing sport since 1977(TM).

While Coleman showed United and MLS around the place last week, Hennepin County Commissioner Mike Opat was presenting a stadium plan to relieved team owner Bill McGuire. Opat, you may remember, is the commissioner who took charge of the countywide sales tax plan that got Target Field built for the Twins.

Mission accomplished.

It took United and MLS roughly a month to make it happen, expeditious considering St. Paul’s previous flirtations with the Twins and the Vikings, both of whom at least had the leverage of trying desperately to get out of the Metrodome. That Citadel of Ennui made you believe its tenants would play anywhere else.

First, the Twins jockeyed with two St. Paul mayors — Norm Coleman and Randy Kelly — before being bailed out by a 15-cent Hennepin County sales tax that paid more than half of Target Field’s $555 million bill.

In 2011, the Vikings, fresh off a roof collapse and waving what it called the worst stadium deal in the NFL, appeared to look hard at the old armory site in Arden Hills, among others east of the river, before Minneapolis answered with three potential sites and, ultimately, $150 million to build U.S. Bank Stadium on the site of the Metrodome.

Those flirtations seemed ingenuous by comparison. Whatever McGuire might have seen in St. Paul — and, really, he’s never told us what it was — he saw it just long enough for Hennepin County to get a plan together.

We knew United and MLS wanted to be in Minneapolis, where there are more startup breweries and small-batch hipsters. They told us so in March, when McGuire’s team was awarded an MLS expansion franchise to start playing big-league soccer as soon as 2017. The team had a site picked near the Farmers Market and Target Field, and was willing to pay $30 million for it — in fact was ready to pay $120 million for the stadium, as well.

Minneapolis balked at the tax breaks the team required; from Mayor Betsy Hodges on down, Minneapolis politicos knew no one was losing a job over this. In May, the Legislature said no, too. That’s when Coleman declared it totally doable.

That’s far short of a guarantee, the mayor reminded us, but it allowed MLS to sniff around long enough to make everyone forget MLS’ July 1 stadium deadline. In all that time, nothing spoke more loudly than United’s silence. McGuire couldn’t even bring himself to say St. Paul has a great personality and is a really good dancer.

One is tempted to congratulate McGuire, who bought the second-tier pro soccer franchise in 2012, for not even pretending to care about St. Paul. Now, when Opat says United must choose between the Twin Cities, McGuire can say, in honesty, “I never even told her I liked her!”

Major League Soccer, and particularly deputy commissioner Mark Abbott, was more than happy to take the lead on this sham courtship with the Capital City. And who gets mad at MLS?

In fact, it might be hard to find St. Paulites genuinely upset that Major League Soccer won’t be coming to town. The soccer diehards will be happy that MLS is coming here, period; the rest of us will shrug.

Still, it’s no fun being used, and in this case it says more about United and MLS than it says about us.

Follow John Shipley at twitter.com/shipleykid.