This one has been a long time coming.

The Col­orado Rapids will play at Dick’s Sport­ing Goods Park for the first time in 168 days when they host rival Real Salt Lake on Sat­ur­day night. That’s eight days longer than the peri­od between their last home match in 2019 and their first in 2020.

And it will be well worth the wait giv­en it’s the first leg of this year’s Rocky Moun­tain Cup.

But this weekend’s affair isn’t just a rival­ry match, it’s a shot at redemp­tion fol­low­ing a poor show­ing at the MLS is Back Tour­na­ment — one that includ­ed a dread­ful 2–0 pound­ing at the hands of RSL.

“We have a great deal of dri­ve for this game,” head coach Robin Fras­er said Thurs­day. “They’re a good team and they came out on the front foot against us last time. I’m not sure how long it’s been since that game, but it’s been that long that we’ve been talk­ing about it since then.”

No mat­ter what shape it’s been in the last few years, RSL has always had the Rapids’ num­ber. Col­orado hasn’t hoist­ed the Rocky Moun­tain Cup since 2015 and hasn’t won a match against RSL since 2017.

The pair of Damir Kreilach and Albert Rus­nák ran roughshod on the Rapids’ back­line in the teams’ meet­ing in Orlan­do. The unit hasn’t been the same since. Part of that was because of the unique cir­cum­stances of the tour­na­ment, but a big­ger rea­son was poor play.

“I don’t think they’re spe­cial, it’s us,” cen­ter back Lalas Abubakar said. “We gave them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play like that. We didn’t have the inten­si­ty and that’s real­ly impor­tant. We need to match the inten­si­ty to win the game.”

Abubakar explained that one of the issues dur­ing the tour­na­ment was that the team’s defense became too spread out. He said the back­line must remain close to not be exposed.

“We’ve con­tin­ued to work on things that we saw that we could do bet­ter on the attack­ing end as well as the defend­ing end and real­ly again just try­ing to get to that point of con­ti­nu­ity that we had ear­ly in the year,” Fras­er said.

Rapids keep­er Clint Irwin is now recov­ered from a con­cus­sion but it’s unclear if he or William Yarbrough will start against RSL. That’s a ques­tion that per­sists around the field as sev­er­al roles have ques­tion marks.

Saturday’s match will hint at what the Rapids’ iden­ti­ty will be in the final 18 games of the MLS slate.

“The key for us is to be true to our prin­ci­ples and true to our game plan,” Fras­er said. “We want our ideas to be so uni­fied that we can plug guys in and the sys­tem con­tin­ues the way it’s sup­posed to. Under­stand­ing the team phi­los­o­phy and the role that any play­er would play in a par­tic­u­lar posi­tion — if we do a good job of that we have guys who can jump in and play.”