Kyle Beckerman hits league appearances record with 379th MLS game

While we're all sitting here moping about Real Salt Lake's season — and I'm among the lot of you doing just that — there's at least one thing we can look at and smile about.

That's Kyle Beckerman, Real Salt Lake's captain and a storied veteran in this league. He just hit the league record for most regular season matches played by a field player. That's incredible.

He's only 33 years old and he hit that number. Of course, he's helped by the fact that he came in 2000 as an 18-year-old, so he didn't have the four-year college offset that probably kept a lot of players from reaching these numbers.

He has 379 appearances in the league. There are several active players behind him, but he's the top.

In celebration of that, MLS included this video of his first MLS appearance. It's him off the bench for Miami Fusion way back in 2000 — and you get to see him sans dreadlocks. So that's something. And hey, you get to see a player feigning injury (or actually being injured), something that hasn't changed one bit in his game over the years.

Let's ignore tonight's match for just a few minutes and just think about Kyle Beckerman and the impact he's made here. That's much more pleasant, isn't it?