The Union's Andre Blake, center, has played in major international tournaments
and an MLS All-Star Game. And he's just reaching a full season's worth
of games in MLS. (AP)

It’s been almost three years since Andre Blake strode across the stage at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, the first name called in the 2014 MLS SuperDraft by the host team, the Philadelphia Union.

In the intervening years, Blake has established himself as the No. 1 for Jamaica and garnered speculation of whether Europe lies in his future.

But while it feels like he’s been with the Union forever (at least long enough to see five Union teammates play goal in MLS), he’s nearing a significant milestone: Blake is one game shy of a season-long, 34-game sample on which to judge his talents.

Here are Blake’s career stats in MLS play:

33 games
114 saves/50 goals allowed
1.51 goals-against average
69.5 save percentage
8 clean sheets
12-13-8 record

The stats have to be taken with a sizeable grain of salt. Blake has played 26 of the Union’s 27 games this season, which means around a quarter of his career was logged with behind losing soccer, dragging the stats down. Yet Union manager Jim Curtin is upbeat about Blake’s individual contributions, particularly as he’s sustained them over a long stretch to validate the talent that so many saw in the Jamaican.

“He’s been excellent,” Curtin said Wednesday. “He’s a guy that you never know until you get your first full season, right? Still seven games left, but his body of work this year has been strong.”

Among MLS goalies with 12 or more games played this season, Blake ranks 15th in goals-against average (1.50) and 17th in save percentage (66.9). That’s not exactly jump-off-the-page stuff, even if his GAA is better than either Brian Sylvestre (1.58) or John McCarthy (1.64) last season. And in the perception-vs.-reality debate, recall that Blake was comfortably elected to the All-Star Game via the fan vote, meaning that the Union staff isn't the only one that sees something special in his approach to the game.
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I think the obvious has already been addressed, but now that the dust has settled a bit, here are a few other things that I noticed as the Union let another two points slip away in a 2-2 draw with Real Salt Lake.

- If the Union somehow miss the playoffs, the image of Sebastien Le Toux firing a ball into the hands of Josh Saunders should be on the cover of the season highlight tape. No moment would encapsulate the season quite so well. I hate to kill Le Toux for the game he had, since he scored the first goal and was active throughout. John Hackworth took a similar tack: "Sebastien had done so much work in that game," he said. "It’s hard to fault any guy that has run as much as he has and the length of the sprints and the efforts that he’s put out." But left all by his lonesome, the truth is that Le Toux has to finish it. I could bold, italicize and all-cap “has”, and it still doesn’t quite capture the pertinence of that sentence. Is he the main culprit in the loss? No. But it’s certainly a person of interest.

- I’ve never thought that the phrase “devastating draw” could be cobbled together, much less be perfectly appropriate two times in the span of five days. But once again, the Union jump on the emotional roller coaster and leave it feeling nauseous. From “a draw would be good” at the beginning to “must-have three points” late on when up a man and a goal (twice!) to feeling hard-done by leaving with the original result. The Union are turning the process of making a draw feel like a loss into an art, and you have to wonder what the psychological toll of two straight games like that is come Saturday against Houston. This team is resilient – the defiance with which Conor Casey almost blasted the ball through the net on the second goal – shows that, but you just wonder how much they can take.

- The final score line doesn’t bear it out, but I thought that Matt Kassel actually played well. Pairing with Brian Carroll late in the game actually had a bit of a calming effect, at least for a while.

- The verdict on Leo Fernandes' first start: Eh, not bad. He was a little too easily dispossessed from time to time, but it wasn't a bad debut on all counts.
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