The last time I talked to a friend in person was over five months ago. I’ve locked myself into the one mile radius around my apartment, venturing as far as the Ralph’s to pick up groceries. There, I am only two blocks away from the metro, which is only a forty-five minute ride to anywhere in Los Angeles. It’s a surreal moment that feels like a balloon being slowly inflated, and I am watching and waiting for it to pop. Only it never does.
In April, as Cloud9 brought the brunt of their weight down on the FlyQuest Nexus to secure a 3-0 sweep in the LCS Spring Finals, you can see a focused Licorice on his player cam rip off his headset in joy. Seconds later a C9 staff member storms the room with a bowl of confetti that he throws all over the room, and he is followed by a few more staff members, including owner Jack who is carrying a trophy. There is no thunderous applause from an audience of thousands. The noise doesn’t echo off the stadium’s dome roof. You don’t see the dejected faces of the FLY members. It is, instead, very quiet. Such is our lives these past five months.
After that, we watched as Covid-19 uprooted everything we took for granted as being normal, and slowly, but surely, more and more events were cancelled or postponed. This included this year’s Mid-Season Invitational, where Cloud9 would have advanced to for the first time in franchise history (which is a really crazy 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. It’s a reverse-results kind of year for C9, only they weren’t rewarded with the MSI trip in the Spring.
And now we are one Best-of-5 away from seeing their year entirely without a single international trip to show for it. This was a Cloud9 roster that started off the year on a 35-2 and looked nigh unstoppable. They posted the greatest single season winning percentage ever in the Spring and opened up on a 9-0 tear in the summer that had us asking not whether they’d win but by how much. Losing here would be devastating, but perhaps it would be a fitting metaphor for how the year has played out beyond the Rift.
Cloud9 losing would be, in some ways for me, a pop. The whole fanbase would be wrested from their perch, where it felt like they were watching the best team NA has ever produced, and you’d start to wonder just how much of this year has been real. I know I’ve been asking that question on a nearly daily basis. It feels not like not Cloud9 who has lost all these games in the last month but a fake team wearing cheap Halloween costumes of C9. Gone were the big snowballs from Blaber in the early game. Gone were the 3k gold leads at 15minutes that ballooned into a 10k gold lead just 10 minutes later. Gone was Zven’s 100+ KDA and gone was Nisqy’s omnipresence on the map.
Instead they’d find themselves facechecking bushes to prevent the enemy team from securing a Dragon Soul. They’d find themselves outnumbered in a skirmish as they were slow to a play, and they’d find that the same opponents they’d beaten into submission in the Spring were now striking back. I’ve stared 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 on the brink of being robbed of a moment, and the moment is not one that *has* transpired but one that never did.
We never got to see a peak Cloud9 this year take on the likes of G2 Esports or JDG. Recently, Broxah mentioned in an interview that he was sick of seeing people focus on the negatives when looking at the top teams in NA, and while I agree with him, it was never really a thing we saw with C9’s success. We focused primarily on the positives there, and any caution was tied more to NA’s history of failure as opposed to what C9 actually looked 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 point it kind of feels like we aren’t *about* to lose a moment 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 go into Worlds knowing that they *have* struggled this year. You know they could struggle again. Once you are scratched for the first time, and the scar sticks, you don’t get to be invincible again.
Still, there is a part of me that hasn’t completely come to terms with Cloud9 being on the brink of elimination, just as I haven’t come fully to terms with losing the normalcy of the last five months to this pandemic. It doesn’t feel fair at all to have lost any of this, but here we are, and for Cloud9, at least, all of their struggles could be washed away for now with a single Bo5 win over their oldest rival. We might have lost peak C9 for good, but they don’t have to 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 was never about making sense.
