The MLS conference semifinals will be staged as a quadruple-header on Sunday. Atlantic Cup rivals D.C. United and New York meet again, Seattle and FC Dallas reprise their 2014 playoff meeting, Montreal hosts Columbus, and Portland tries to build on its incredible PK-win in the knockout round when Northwest foe Vancouver comes to town.

One of my favorite soccer memories: I was 13, sitting next to my grandfather who was visiting us from Germany, in Aloha Stadium watching Team Hawaii play the Las Vegas Quicksilvers.

The expanded playoff format adopted by MLS for the 2015 seasons adds the third-place teams, which in previous years went straight into the conference semifinals, in the knockout phase.

The MLS playoffs start off Wednesday with knockout games between the fourth and fifth seeds in each conference. New England takes on D.C. United at RFK Stadium, and Seattle hosts the LA Galaxy at Century Link Field. The survivors advance as the home teams for the conference semifinals that start Sunday, and all four teams are looking to salvage disappointing performances in the regular season.

There was not much separating the New York Red Bulls and FC Dallas, winners of MLS's Eastern and Western Conferences, respectively.

The MLS regular season concludes Sunday with four of 12 playoff spots undecided and a dizzying array of postseason possibilities. But it's clear that a playoff game in Toronto is long overdue and the most Northwest games that get in, the better.

Jurgen Klinsmann spent all year hyping up the 2017 Confederations Cup to which the USA would have qualified by winning either the 2015 Gold Cup or the one-off Concacaf Cup. Neither happened so it's on to the next task: qualify for the 2018 World Cup.

Thanks to a scheduling change, the Supporters' Shield race between FC Dallas and the Red Bulls will be played out simultaneously, as will the relevant games in each conference to finalize playoff participants and their final placings.

Expansion of the playoff fields in each conference from five teams to six raises the number of teams at risk in the knockout round when the No. 6 seed plays at No. 3 and No. 5 travels to No. 4. Such conditions put more pressure on teams to get results in the final weeks of the regular seasonb but won't quiet critics.

First of all, let's sum up the last few months for the men's national team and its subset, the under-23s.

Among the many German-raised players Jurgen Klinsmann brought into the U.S. national team, Fabian Johnson was especially intriguing.

It was Black Saturday for the USA. Mexico thoroughly outclassed Jurgen Klinsmann's team after the U.S. U-23s, aiming to qualify for the Olympics, got schooled by Honduras.

Is the Concacaf Cup classico to be waged between the USA and Mexico Saturday at the Rose Bowl a referendum on the four years-plus of Jurgen Klinsmann's tenure? Should he resign if the U.S. loses and U.S. Soccer president refuses to fire him?

The hiring of Juan Carlos Osorio marks the sixth time in the past two years that the Mexican soccer federation (FMF) has changed national-team head coaches. He's the sixth man named to the post since U.S. Soccer hired Jurgen Klinsmann, which gives an indication how different is the soccer environment in two neighboring but very different cultures.

There are certainly some poor teams in MLS this season for which parity seems a long way away, but none of the top teams have pushed themselves away from the rest of their upper-tier neighbors. With just a handful of games to go for each team, this season might be the first in which no team loses less than 10 games.