The 1977 season is by far the most fabled in New York Cosmos history. Inspired to send Pelé into retirement with a North American Soccer League Championship, the star-studded New Yorkers overcame behind-the-scenes intrigue in both the locker room and boardroom to emerge as the toast of the town, celebrities flocking to Giants Stadium while the squad enjoyed the Big Apple limelight as fixtures at Studio 54.

Forty years after that date with destiny, the Cosmos cannot forget how the fairy tale finish to a storybook season was almost spoiled by the Seattle Sounders at Soccer Bowl 77 in Portland. 

“It was emotional,” remembers goalkeeper, Shep Messing, “and it was a tough game.”

Winger, Steve Hunt, recalls: “It was a close game. It could have gone either way. But I just thought it was gonna be our day. For Pelé’s sake, it had to be. We pulled out all the stops for him.”

Although billed as a battle between an offensive juggernaut and a stalwart defense, the game featured end-to-end action played at a furious pace. The Cosmos began with a 4-2-4 formation while Seattle used a 4-4-2. 

And it was Seattle that had the earliest best chances. In the 8th minute, Seattle’s Jocky Scott fired a shot from 33 yards out, but Shep Messing made a diving save, barely flicking the ball up to the crossbar with his left hand. Mickey Cave tapped in the deflection, but what seemed like a goal was disallowed for offside. Ten minutes later, Scott sent a cross into the Cosmos’ penalty area and Tommy Ord rose above Roth for a header that seemed to beat Messing, but missed by inches. 

Then in the 19th minute, a bizarre play seemed to signal that destiny was on the side of the Cosmos. Giorgio Chinaglia collected the ball in the centre circle and sent a long ball down the left flank with the outside of his right foot towards winger, Stevie Hunt. Sounders goalkeeper, Tony Chursky, collected the ball before the onrushing Hunt, but then Chursky relaxed, dropped the ball to himself and began to dribble the ball in his area. Like a fox, Hunt raced from behind the startled keeper to tap the ball into the open goal, a desperate Chursky smashing into Hunt as the ball crossed the line.

Hunt: “I had the ball down the sideline, chased it, and the goalkeeper got there first. I thought I’d keep an eye on him in case he happened to turn his back. Lucky for me, he did. I saw he rolled it and thought I would try and pinch it off him. We both ended up in a heap in a net. It was just like silence, as if to say, ‘Did that just happen? Is it really a goal?’”

In that moment of cunning and opportunism, Hunt taught the soccer world a lesson for the ages: “You have to be alert. You never know what might happen.”

The Sounders stormed right back. Four minutes later, Beckenbauer lost the ball at the Cosmos’ 35-yard line (marked for the offside line and shootout rules then in place for league play), and intricate short-passing between Cave, Scott and Ord sliced apart the Cosmos defense, the former Cosmos forward Ord slipping the ball under a diving Messing.

The second-half was just as frantic. The deadlock was finally broken in the 78th minute, when a Stevie Hunt cross into the six-yard box was nodded by Chinaglia over his right shoulder into the upper-right corner of the Sounders’ goal. 

Still, the Sounders refused to surrender. In a play nearly as flukey as his first-half goal, in the 83rd minute Stevie Hunt won the ball by the Cosmos’ left corner. Inexplicably, he began dribbling the ball into the New York penalty area, where he lost the ball to Steve Buttle. Buttle’s point-blank shot bounced off the left post after a diving finger-tip save from Messing to preserve the lead.

“We could easily have lost the final game,” concedes Captain Werner Roth, but somehow the Cosmos held on to win “what was the most important game of our lives.”  

The final whistle brought tears of joy as the Cosmos fulfilled their promise to send off the world’s greatest footballer as a champion in his final competitive game. “It was incredible,” recalls Roth. “It was euphoria for weeks and weeks. The fear of not winning, having totally been taken off your shoulders and just the kind of euphoric calm that everything is okay, all of this work, all of this effort the last couple of years, now it’s okay, now it is done. We had won the seminal championship that we needed to win, Pelé’s last season.”

For Messing, “that was just a magical year and I just can’t imagine how it could have ended any other way other than winning that last game.”

Having won the club’s first league title five years prior, the Cosmos were the first team to win a second NASL Championship (the Chicago Sting the only other club to win more than once) and the next year they would become the first team to repeat as NASL champions, repeating that feat in 2015 and 2016. 

The 1977 season was the start of the Cosmos Country phenomenon and the beginning of North American soccer’s greatest dynasty. Soccer Bowl ’77 was the fitting, thrilling finish to the Cosmos’ most legendary season. 

The artistry, belief, composure and determination demonstrated on that title-winning day forty years ago continues to inspire the Cosmos as they pursue an unprecedented third straight NASL title in 2017.