On Feb. 5, 2014, David Beckham strode onto a stage in a smart suit snapping blithely in a tropical Miami breeze. With MLS commissioner Don Garber beaming like the moon-showered plains of the Masai Mara and Miami mayor Carlos Gimenez on his other side, Beckham helped announce that his new Miami team – whatever it was called – was to be the league’s 22nd team. Expansion had come to Miami a second time, or so it seemed.

The twists and turns since then are too innumerable to count, but it has never really seemed as though Miami was ready for Major League Soccer. The stadium deal has whipsawed from an inevitability to an impossibility, but the newest news this week is not particularly cheery.

After Chivas USA folded, Atlanta United, LAFC and Minnesota United were all confirmed in Miami’s place while its stadium deal is either ironed or left to flail under the placid waters of the Biscayne Bay. That is 21, 22 and 23. It appears for now that Garber’s round number of 24 teams by 2020 is missing by one.

Or maybe not, says Sacramento. Maybe we are the one.

If you have paid any attention to the Sacramento Republic USL team, you know by now that they have made little secret of their readiness for MLS. Their #BuiltForSacramento hashtag on Twitter is as ubiquitous as the sun, and they have continually lobbied Garber and the league for admission. A 2014 league championship, a well-oiled front office and a built-in supporter’s group a la Orlando gives them a significant edge on a hypothetical wisp of air like whatever Beckham’s plans for Miami entail.

There is more. This week, the Sacramento city council approved a stadium plan that includes full financing for $180 million in stadium costs and a further $46 million in surrounding backbone infrastructure. This is what that stadium looks like.

A full bowl. A proper nudge at their cousins down the road.

One can sense Garber’s dilemma in air fraught with a knifing split between business interests and soccer interests. Beckham is a name, and his ownership group includes Marcelo Claure, Sprint’s CEO worth an estimated $1 billion. Plus, there is Miami and the palms and the Latin market and Beckham and everything else. It is the easy play, the bombshell, the PR release.

But there is little questioning that if there is a 24th team on the table, and Garber would like it done by 2020 when he has his current firmament set before the next expansion spasm, Sacramento is the play. And it has always been.

Sacramento is not the name brand city, is not fronted the glamorous billion-dollar investor jet-setting in Miami yachts, is not designed to make a news ripple – however small – in Bogota and Buenos Aires and Manchester and Madrid. But if the ghosts of our past relations are to guide us into more common and suitable partnerships in the future, and we are to let the corpse of Chivas USA be a waypoint and not a lost grave, then Miami’s shifting climate is not to be trusted yet. Sacramento has precedent in Orlando. Miami has precedent in…

And yet Garber and MLS will be stuck between these two globes as they strive to make a decision for the immediate here and now because the allure of Miami Beckham FC is too great and the bird in hand in Sacramento pales because it is already won. Can we do this? you can almost hear Garber murmur as he excitedly pours over Miami stadium options and piers and the money and all of it. Meanwhile, Sacramento is waving from its stable, working Volvo as a fictional Lamborghini continues to tempt MLS.

This is not to suggest that MLS will abandon Miami by choosing Sacramento as No. 24. It is a deferral or an ellipses, however it is viewed in other circles. Nudging Sacramento up the ladder will perhaps kill Beckham’s involvement, but maybe not. Who knows, exactly? Beckham may only be holding in because he wants a team quickly, and if it is not delivered to him he may disappear. I don’t see that as viable, but it is perhaps something Garber is weighing.

There will be no particularly easy decisions where these two teams are concerned, and Miami will not be edged out of the discussion quietly. And there is something psychological about something sensible continually losing to something just on the other side of practicality. Something just dangerous enough to be enticing. It is the difference between – as it is set up now – someone you would date and then someone you would marry. Miami is not yet marriage material. It is all Sacramento has ever really been.

But Miami will always exist, with Beckham or with others. It is shimmering always in the distance, and given time the city will eventually warm to a stadium. But that time does not appear to be now, and it is a far better thing to let it rest and fulminate and grow while a sturdier sapling is given a healthier dose of the sun.

That sapling is Sacramento. Time to pull the trigger.