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Toronto FC's Sebastian Giovinco gets a shot off at goal during the first half of the CONCACAF Champions League final first leg, in Toronto, on April 17, 2018.Chris Young/The Canadian Press

Ahead of Thursday night’s CONCACAF Champions League first leg, executives from Chivas Guadalajara were out on the field en masse.

Nobody bothered checking the condition of the pitch – the usual purpose of these forays.

Instead, a bunch of middle-aged guys in sharkskin suits lined up in the goalmouth to take pictures with piles of snow in the background.

Selfies, group shots, duos, down on one knee, a small fellow held in a larger fellow’s arms. This was a wedding’s worth of photography.

If the Mexican visitors were taken by the sight of winter, it was only because these ones knew they’d be watching the game from indoors.

“We in Guadalajara have the perfect weather,” Chivas manager Matias Almeyda said before the game. “You can feel the cold, but we know that our players have warm blood, so I’m not worried.”

As Chivas came out for the pregame routine, it began to snow lightly. And the players looked worried. Several of them did their warm-up wearing parkas, tuques and long johns. Toronto FC’s head trainer did it in shorts and a T-shirt.

Short of planting landmines under the visitors’ bench, this was shaping up as the greatest home-field advantage in sporting history.

So, of course, the Mexicans scored in the second minute.

They scored again in the 72nd on an awful error by Toronto FC goalkeeper Alex Bono, who let a long-distance cross sail over his head into the net. It ended 2-1 for the visitors.

The result doesn’t put this tie out of reach, but it means there can be no stratagems on the other end. Nobody’s killing off a game or trying to gut one out. Toronto has to go to Mexico on the 25th and beat Chivas straight up. And in that case, there will no excuses for anyone on a pristine pitch.

By the half, the field had been chewed to mulch. Considering the recent weather, the fact that the grass was still green seemed like an agricultural miracle.

The cold made the ball as dense as concrete. As the game got deeper, anything more ambitious than a 10-yard pass looked like lawn bowling – bound to steer wildly away from the intended recipient.

By the time the game ended, it was nobody’s advantage and everyone just looked like they wanted to get inside and have a nice, long soak.

Next week in Guadalajara, the forecast calls for 33 C and sunny. That’s where this tournament will be either won or lost.

The CONCACAF Champions League matters because it is virgin ground.

No Major League Soccer club has ever won this event (the L.A. Galaxy won the old Champions Cup format 29 years ago).

That failure has made it difficult for MLS to claim (as it often does) that this league is competing with those in Europe and South America.

In the one venue open to it, it finds itself somewhere on par with Costa Rica.

The format – all the games wedged up together in a tight window at the beginning of an MLS season – doesn’t tend to favour the northern types.

But conventional thinking has it that the CCL is so difficult because no Canadian or American side can be expected to survive the pressure of playing in Mexico. Nobody would suggest they might win there. The expectation is that gringos will go there and fold up like a deck chair, ruining any chance of making up ground in the home leg.

Why? Because it’s loud, hot and people in Mexico care more about soccer than people do here. (All true.)

If that doesn’t sound like a good excuse, it’s because it isn’t. Beating Mexican players who are paid about the same, in front of the similar-sized crowds, in weather no more oppressive than the Florida Panhandle in July, should happen every once in a while, if not on the regular.

But winning the CCL (i.e. holding its own in Mexico) has become MLS’s four-minute mile. Until someone manages it, it’s going to seem impossible.

Over the past few years, Toronto FC has become the league’s model in terms of building sustainable sides. Build on an American spine with a little European flare. Spread the money around to a few Europeans who aren’t over here slumming. Build the back end cheap and tough. Also, stumble on a Giovinco.

Over these past two months, it has now become the league’s last, best hope at CCL success. Before Tuesday night, you’d have said Toronto had already done the hard work in this regard. They beat Liga MX champions, Tigres, in the quarter-final. They beat Club America – including a draw in Mexico City’s famed gladiator ring, Estadio Azteca – in the semis.

That left them with Chivas, a club with a famous name and an up-and-down modern record. You might call them the Spurs of Mexican soccer.

After Tuesday’s result, Chivas is going to look like Real Madrid with gigantism once they get back to Mexico. Through three matches, Chivas has yet to allow a goal at home in this tournament.

Toronto will need at least one, and possibly more.

The lure at the end is a place in the impressive-sounding FIFA Club World Cup, to be held in United Arab Emirates in December.

This is where clubs from the colonies get to visit exotic locales and have their heads handed to them by the world’s true elite. This may be the least treasured Cup on earth because no one capable of winning the thing cares much about it.

But for Toronto FC (and MLS by extension), being there would at least allow them to say that they’d played the Liverpools or Bayerns of the world in a game that mattered. It’s the only way that can happen for a North American team.

That’s still miles off, and got a little further on Tuesday.

First, that trip to Mexico in a week’s time, where history has proved that no MLS team can hope to win. Until one does.

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