We are only one-third of the way through the calendar year, and as of next Tuesday, Forge FC will have already played in three—count ’em—three different championship competitions.

Back in early February, yes, mid-winter, the Hammers played Mexico’s legendary Chivas twice in the opening round of the Concacaf Champions Cup. Saturday afternoon, Forge earned another three points with a 2-1 victory over Valour FC at Tim Hortons Field in a CPL regular-season game.

And four days later, it’s the first round of the Canadian Championship, with regional and 905 Derby rival York United FC arriving Wednesday for a 7 p.m. kickoff in a lose-and-you’re-out game.

Don’t confuse Wednesday’s game with a regular CPL match just because both teams are in the same league and played a few days ago in York. The hardest-core soccer fans won’t get muddled about that; it’s as familiar as their personal pillow.

But casual and new soccer fans—and followers of all other North American sports—can get confused. And usually do.

Oh, do they get confused. For immediate reference, just Google reactions to the NBA’s in-season tournament, which made its debut in December. That reaction, even from smart journalists, was almost universal, and, it says here, almost infantile. To them, keeping track of more than one championship stream was like juggling chainsaws. They didn’t like it and couldn’t figure out the value. Didn’t want to figure out the value. Neither did the players, although they knew the value to them. Extra cash, serious extra cash.

The cynicism among fans and journalists was a little justified: sure, it was a cash grab—these things usually are; sure, it came before Christmas when the NBA unofficially gains traction; and sure, there are so many games in North American pro sports it’s hard for early-season games to have an impact.

By the time the Los Angeles Lakers met and beat the Indiana Pacers for the NBA Cup, the remaining players had altered their attitude and their hearts were really in it. Elimination tournaments tend to produce that effect.

And here’s a prediction. Down the road, when the tournament is still going and has a larger cachet (and other leagues adopt a similar event), the Pacers will wish they’d won. And all the teams who’d bombed out in the earlier rounds will wish they’d tried harder. The Lakers are the first, and because they’re L.A., winning that Cup gives it meaning. It will never go away.

And, wheeling back to Forge, a soccer title once won never goes away, and it has meaning of its own.

Europeans and most other soccer continents don’t even blink about following their team in one competition, then another four days later, and maybe even a third the week after that. Heck, Bayern Munich and Canadian Alphonso Davies held six different championship trophies concurrently in the 2020 and ’21 seasons. And Barcelona achieved the sextuple in 2009.

Nobody who follows those teams has any trouble keeping those trophies straight—the bigger challenge is keeping them polished—or understanding why each championship, especially elimination events like the Canadian Championships, matters.

David Edgar, Forge FC coach and Canadian national soccer legend, is uniquely positioned to discuss the multi-competition juggernaut. He’s encountered it from the inside as a player in Europe, the U.S., and with Forge, and as a coach. But he also lived in England from the age of 14 as he began his climb up soccer’s ladder and was an avid fan of the game.

“I understand it’s quite different for the North American fan to wrap their head around ‘Well, what is this Cup? And what is the Cup we played for in the Champions League?’” Edgar—affectionately known as Eddie—says.

“And then you’ve got the Canadian Championship, which sort of touches on the FA Cup in England. Anyone who’s in the professional environment in the country can win it. Even if you’re an amateur team.

“In England, the roster is bigger, and guys who need a few minutes will play in the Cup game. There, it tends to be a Championship team playing against League 2 teams in the opening round. And it’s that way here; you’ve got an MLS team (Toronto FC) playing against an amateur team (Simcoe County) the other night in the Canadian Championship. So there are a lot of moving pieces.

“What you want the Canadian, and North American, fans to really wrap their heads around is it’s a chance to win silverware.”

Trophies, plaques, and plates hold a place of honour in the Forge FC dressing room. Not a day goes by that the entire squad doesn’t see the four League championship shields and the two for finishing first. Several times.

All are important, and so are two that are missing, the Canadian Championship—Forge reached the 2020 final—and the Champions Cup. The latter is the big one because the peak of that pyramid is the world club championship, which no North American team has ever won.

There are three ways for a CPL team to get into the Champions Cup—win the regular season, win the playoff championship, win the Canadian Championship—and Forge still has all three options alive in 2024, which is what makes Wednesday night’s national tournament game against York United so significant. Hamilton manhandled the Toronto-area team a few days ago 3-0, but York looked good in humbling Vancouver 3-0 on Friday.

And, Edgar cautions, none of the above actually matters in a stand-alone:

“A tip for the fans from me would be, form goes out the window. You could have won the last five games in the league, but stepping into a Cup game is completely different. It’s 90 minutes, it’s knockout, usually one-off, games, and anything can happen. The middle teams can beat the big teams, the big teams can step on the banana peels. It’s up and down.

“I think that’s the beauty of a Cup. You have to beat the best to get to the final and win it. And you have an opportunity every game if you’re a lower team or a higher team.”

And in the Canadian Championships, the Hammers are arguably both. They’re ranked in Concacaf well below the MLS sides, and they’re ranked well above the semi-pro squads who also get their kick at the can. They’re equals, on paper at least, to the seven other CPL teams, including York.

Both sides want to win Wednesday’s sudden-death match so they can meet CF Montreal in a home-and-away series in round two, and it’s particularly resonant with Hamilton because of their heartbreaking shootout loss in the 2021 Canadian semi-final. York, meanwhile, wants to continue their rebound from two season-opening losses. Noah Jensen, who scored the late winner Saturday—his first goal in a year and 10 days—against Valour FC said on Saturday that York won’t be the same team they played just a few days ago.

“They’re looking for retribution, but at the same time, it’s a one-off game, it’s Cup football, and league form goes out the window,” Edgar agrees. “So what happened 10 days prior to that means nothing. They’ve got 11 guys trying to stop us from winning the game.

“For us, it’s about taking one game at a time. Our focus was on Saturday’s game and the league. When we dusted off from that, we debriefed and then we moved on to the Cup game on Wednesday. And that’s what the boss (Bobby Smyrniotis) here is really good at; dealing with what’s in front of us and moving on to the next one.

“For fans, I think it’s about just embracing what you’re coming to watch.”

And on Wednesday night, that will be the first step on a long stairway to the national championship and a chance for an early berth in the Champions Cup. Even going one game at a time, that competition, the highest level of club play in North and Central America and the Caribbean, is never far from the Hammers’ collective consciousness.

“Champions Cup is the pinnacle, and it’s what every team in North America is trying to qualify for in a season,” Edgar says. “For fans, it’s just like they’re watching the Real Madrid and the Barcelonas play…only on this side of the world.

“If you can do it by winning the Canadian Championship, great. If you can do it by winning the league, great. Or by winning the North Star Cup, great. If you can do it by winning all three…even better. That’s the bar we’ve set here.”

Edgar believes that as they acclimatize to the town team playing simultaneously in three and, hopefully, four distinct competitions every year, local fans—newcomers or diehards—will consider it a natural part of the landscape.

“Yes, 100 percent true,” he says. “It’s new to North American sports, not just soccer. And it’s new to basketball. That wasn’t around when I was a kid.

“Nobody likes change at the beginning. Nobody. It happened with VAR; it happened with everything new in football before this.

“But then you have to embrace it and just move on.”