Even in its darkest days, Columbus was always a USMNT haven, a shelter from storms both tepid and unremitting. MAPFRE Stadium, with its charmingly austere bleachers and blocky video board and pastoral surroundings, felt charmingly set apart from the rest of the U.S.’s usual stops. Almost like a sort of homey embrace in a world of handshakes.

It is not Carson, the city sprawl stretching for miles around. Or any of the eastern seaboard cities on the typical rotation with their vertical urbanity. Not even like nouveau riche save shelters like Sporting Park or BBVA Compass Stadium.

There was always a definable soul about Columbus for the national team, like a perceptible outline against a gray field.

It has never surprised or galled me that the U.S. chose to continually schedule Mexico matches here. In terms of sheer crowd insanity there are better places for the match; football stadiums in major metros, perhaps, or one of the two Pacific Northwest locales with sod pulled over the turf. And to be sure there are cities with more prevailing soccer cultures than Columbus. But not the culture of USA-Mexico.

The fixture’s spent 15 years being branded into the consciousness of the Mexican national team as a sort of Azteca-in-minature. It had power, invincibility, that certain scoreline attached to it. And while the history of that time is far from distant, the mystique surrounding its aura was popped on a night that represented the fixture in all its fabled ministry:

– It was cold

– The U.S. had a largely healthy first choice squad

– A “mentally weak” Mexico’s last competitive match was a 7-0 loss

– The full stadium was overwhelmingly American

The U.S. lost anyway. And it was Rafa Marquez who twisted in the sharply serrated dagger.

It was not just the U.S.’s first loss to Mexico in Columbus after four consecutive 2-0 wins. It was also the team’s first World Cup qualifier loss on home soil to Mexico anywhere since 1972.

Pay attention to the verbiage we use whenever a Columbus fixture pops up on the horizon: sentimentality, fortress, history, dos-a-cero, mental edge. They are calling cards of the past, which is continually being reinvented in light of current events. Columbus’s utility, and certainly its utility when weighed against other venues, was always in overwhelming mystique the U.S. had constructed around it that made it seem like a vast network of impenetrable defenses.

When in reality it was a carefully manicured set of smoke and mirrors constructed around a few remarkably consistent results. And now, the aura all but dissipated for a generation of Mexican players who no longer fear it, Columbus is perhaps not the first choice for the home Mexico fixture anymore.

And at the very least, the discussion deserves its day. Columbus should no longer be the unquestioned home of the biggest World Cup qualifier on these shores.

The analytical mind will soon drift toward the miraculous 1-0 win over Mexico in the Estadio Azteca in 2012 that broke through a 25-game winless drought in Mexico. The Azteca is as vaunted a venue in the world, and the U.S. has invariably performed poorly there. But less than a year after that win (the residuals of which continue to sprinkle minutes onto Michael Orozco to this day), the U.S. got an arguably bigger result with a scoreless draw at the Azteca in World Cup qualifying. Two games at the Azteca, two years, four points.

And that same analytical mind will point out that no, kind sir, Mexico did not abandon the Azteca after a few damaging results. And things are fine, in a relative sense.

But MAPFRE Stadium (a tremor-inducing name for its enemies, no doubt) is not the Azteca. It does not seat nearly 100,000 people. It did not turn 50 years old this year. It did not host both The Goal of the Century and The Game of the Century. It is not thrust 7,380 feet into the sky. It is not a seething cauldron of humanity that often walks the line between uncharitable and frightening for the opposition.

It is simply MAPFRE Stadium. Home of the homespun Columbus Crew, a speck on the Midwestern plain, a fine place to watch a game of soccer and perhaps a legend fading quietly into merely what it is: an aging soccer stadium like many others in the middle of the country.

This is not to denounce the past (which deserves its due) or to knock those wonderfully fanatical Midwest fans. But the Mexican national team more or less toppled the sentimentality of the place in one fell 89th minute swoop from the USMNT’s mortal enemy himself. That complex – Mexico can’t win here – kept the game in Columbus for a decade and a half. That complex has dissipated now.

In those 15 years, an entire American soccer economy rose up about Columbus and made its once-cutting edge stadium look like a relic. There is the inhospitable altitude in Denver that righted the 2014 World Cup cycle, an intimate and uniquely daunting atmosphere in Portland, a roiling sea of noise in Seattle. In New York City, the nascent NYCFC bent the arc of the city’s Europhilia ever so slightly toward MLS. Kansas City’s become the soccer jewel of the Midwest, while still others nurse an ever-growing soccer scene.

The point is not that Columbus should be forever stripped of the Mexico game. You cannot deny history. But to similarly deny other cities out of hand for a legend that no longer has any concurrent ties to the present would be the height of arrogance. If the discussion was not open before, it should be now. Marquez offered the first commentary himself.

Perhaps the next time Mexico comes to the U.S. for a match? Start a new legend. Because old ones often die before their keepers realize.