C9 and TSM hit the Rift for one of the optimum stakes matches in LCS history. C9 could lose it all.
The last time I talked to a friend one on one was over five months ago. I’ve locked average joe into the one mile radius around my apartment, venturing out as far as the Ralph’s to pick up groceries. There, I am mainly two blocks away from the metro, which is only a forty-five minute ride to anywhere in Los Angeles. It’s a surreal minute that feels like a balloon being slowly inflated, and i also am watching and waiting for it to pop. Mainly it never does.
In April, as Cloud9 helped bring the brunt of their weight down on the FlyQuest Nexus to secure a 3-0 sweep in the LCS Spring Finals, lit . a focused Licorice on his player cam rip out his headset in joy. Seconds later a C9 staff member storms the room with a bowl of confetti that he conducts all over the room, and he is followed by a few more staff members, together with owner Jack who is carrying a trophy. There is no thunderous applause from an audience of thousands. The noise does not necessarily echo off the stadium’s dome roof. You don’t understand the dejected faces of the FLY members. It is, instead, rather quiet. Such is our lives these past five calendar months.
After that, we watched as Covid-19 uprooted everything we took for granted as being normal, and slowly, but surely, ever more events were cancelled or postponed. This included the year’s Mid-Season Invitational, where Cloud9 would have advanced towards for the first time in franchise history (which is a really goofy fact considering they’ve literally never missed Worlds). They’ve always been a team that turned it on in the summer, which makes their slide in the last month so shocking. The new reverse-results kind of year for C9, only they weren’t rewarded with the MSI trip in the Spring.
And now i'm one Best-of-5 away from seeing their year entirely without getting a single international trip to show for it. This was a Cloud9 roster that started off the year on a 35-2 and considered nigh unstoppable. They posted the greatest single season back again percentage ever in the Spring and opened up on a 9-0 tear in the summer that had us asking not regardless if they’d win but by how much. Losing here is devastating, but perhaps it would be a fitting metaphor just for how the year has played out beyond the Rift.
Cloud9 losing would be, in some ways for me, a place. The whole fanbase would be wrested from their perch, where it all felt like they were watching the best team NA has got ever produced, and you’d start to wonder just how much for this year has been real. I know I’ve been asking the fact that question on a nearly daily basis. It feels not like possibly not Cloud9 who has lost all these games in the last month however , a fake team wearing cheap Halloween costumes of C9. Gone were the big snowballs from Blaber in the premature game. Gone were the 3k gold leads for 15 minutes that ballooned into a 10k gold lead basically 10 minutes later. Gone was Zven’s 100+ KDA and even gone was Nisqy’s omnipresence on the map.
Instead they’d find themselves facechecking bushes to prevent the enemy team right from securing a Dragon Soul. They’d find themselves outnumbered from a skirmish as they were slow to a play, and they’d find that the same opponents they’d beaten into submission on the Spring were now striking back. I’ve stared along at the screen in disbelief more than once this split as Cloud9 floundered. I’m sure they have as well. It feels like we are found on the brink of being robbed of a moment, and the point in time is not one that has transpired but one that never did.
People never got to see a peak Cloud9 this year take on the kind of G2 Esports or JDG. Recently, Broxah mentioned inside an interview that he was sick of seeing people focus on the very negatives when looking at the top teams in NA, and while I agree with him, it was never really a thing we saw through C9’s success. We focused primarily on the positives certainly, there, and any caution was tied more to NA’s history of failure as opposed to what C9 actually looks like. I hadn’t been this excited to watch an NA team on the international stage in a long time -- maybe not since the original iteration of Cloud9 -- and at this time it kind of feels like we aren’t about to lose some time but rather we already have.
They could go on to take down TSM this weekend and it still won’t be the same. They’d have to go on an absolute tear -- a 9-0 blazing ball of rage straight to a repeat title -- to recapture that magic, and even then you’d procede with going into Worlds 2021 knowing that they have struggled this year. You know they could have difficulties again. Once you are scratched for the first time, and the scar sticks, everyone don’t get to be invincible again.
Still, there is a component to me that hasn’t completely come to terms with Cloud9 being to the brink of elimination, just as I haven’t come wholly to terms with losing the normalcy of the survive five months to this pandemic. It doesn’t feel honest at all to have lost any of this, but here i will be, and for Cloud9, at least, all of their struggles could be washed at bay for now with a single Bo5 win over their oldest compete with. We might have lost peak C9 for good, but they don’t have to always be peak Cloud9 to win on Saturday. And after that -- who is to say what will happen going forward? Nothing about this year has made sense, but for C9, maybe especially when they were winning, it previously was never about making sense.