After beating Afreeca Freecs to advance to the Worlds 2018 Semifinals, I asked Sneaky if that was the happiest moment of his career. He said, “I’ve probably had happier wins — usually those are end of tournament things, like 2013 we won playoffs. And 2014 we won playoffs. Those are super obvious celebrations. This time around, we’re still going on.”

For someone who’s won another couple hundred of games since then, that was a statement that really surprised me. I’d bought so heavily into the “only Worlds matters” narrative that the important aspects of domestic titles kind of slipped off my radar. You can go back to Doublelift’s early days, for example, and see how much he was flamed for having an empty trophy case. And for Sneaky, the finality of winning a split and having closure was something he hadn’t experienced in over five years. 

The 2014 Summer and 2015 Spring Finals were the 3rd and 4th consecutive appearances for Cloud9 respectively. Sometimes I wonder how the course of the league would have shifted had C9 won even one of those championships — especially the 4th one. With Liquid about to play in their 4th consecutive final this Sunday, too, it almost feels like a pedestrian accomplishment even when it’s so monumentally difficult to reach just one. 

Look across the league and you’ll see players who’ve been around forever and yet haven’t even come close to making it to a Finals. But C9 and TSM once played in four straight Finals against each other, and because C9 lost the last two, a ton of mounting pressure led to C9 replacing Hai in the mid lane with Jensen, and the rest is, as they say, history. It’s kind of wild to think that a team could make it to four straight finals and then feel like they need to make a roster change, and while I think it’s impossible to say if it was right or wrong at the time, it’s kind of neat to look back on the specific moment as the turning point of an era for C9. 

C9 would go on to make three more finals in the years to follow, with Sneaky being the only consistent piece through it all, but they’ve fallen every single time. That’s five straight Finals losses. The closest they’ve gotten is the infamous Spring 2017 Finals featuring a blunder from Jensen that’s still talked about to this day. And with Jensen leaving after their Worlds Semifinals loss to Fnatic last year, is that not the bookend to that second and more scattered era of C9?

From the original roster, Meteos, Balls, and LemonNation all slowly slipped to other teams. That Sneaky would outlast them all and then the members to follow — Impact, Jensen, Rush, Ray — is something no one would have predicted back then. The criticism around him ebbs and flows like a tide, always crashing back to land when he starts to falter a bit, and then it recedes away into the sea.

With Nisqy in mid lane and an MVP-caliber performance from Svenskeren this split, C9 could punctuate a new era with a win here. I’m not one to obsess over any sort of loyalty towards a team considering how quickly teams will ship out players, but it’d be pretty damn gratifying for long-time C9 fans to get another win after nearly six years now. Sneaky is the constant through it all, but this win would be very different from the first two. Winning as a rookie means your expectations are going to be that high for the rest of your career, and when you fail to reach that height again, of course it will weigh on you. When you win, it isn’t just that split’s efforts that are being rewarded but every single split before that, too. Every loss that you pushed through. Every split where you managed to stay strong enough to be a starter.  

For Sneaky to still be here is a visual representation of how things haven’t changed. There is little about this iteration of C9 as a brand — the teammates just having fun, the aggressive calls on the Rift, the memes — that is much different from where they started. But it’s also a visual representation of how things have changed. All the specific people around him are different, and he as a person is now six years older. C9 isn’t the darling upstart anymore, and they also haven’t been an LCS champion since. 

It’s been 10 straight splits now since Cloud9 won their second straight LCS championship to begin their existence. There has been no trophy hoist. They haven’t stuck around to tell the crowd how they feel. No one really congratulates you on a second place finish. And having to sit there five times in a row now as the other team comes over to shake your hand has to be getting old for Sneaky and for Cloud9. 

Posting an 89% win rate over your first two splits probably made professional life seem like it would be easy. You win the second one, and part of you maybe thinks you can do this forever. You don’t think it will be six years. Or longer. You don’t think about what the faces around you will look like or where they will be. This weekend, Cloud9 faces a Liquid team that is still riding its first wave of success. It is a team that doesn’t know what it means to lose yet. They, too, might think of all this as being easy. But they, too, might not win for another six years.