Amid all the talk of the changing team captaincy, the future of the coach, the gap between fourth and fifth place in the Eastern Conference, and the absence of "key" players to the US national team (yep, we’ve really missed Earnie Stewart’s goalscoring prowess), one thing has been largely overlooked about Saturday night’s 2-1 win in Chicago. It was DC United’s second successive road victory.

Unless you’re a fan of black (-and-red) comedy, there hasn’t been much to smile about this season, so when you consider not just the statistics prior to the 3-1 victory in Dallas two weeks ago (one road win in almost two years), and the performances during that time (reflecting that the stats were entirely deserved), this turnaround is cause for a jocose beam of relief and, on behalf of a team that has suddenly engaged the Gears of Collective Effort, a sincere nod of congratulations.

Let’s rewind to the 3-0 collapse in Columbus in late June, just four days before the Dallas breakthrough. This was the archetypal DC away performance, followed by the now legendary 45-minute, closed doors verbal showdown in the Crew Saloon. "Everyone got their balls out tonight and said what’s on their mind," said coach Hudson, and they really needed to given the way they’d kept them in their jockstraps for the preceding 90 minutes. The sluggish, insulting lack of effort and fourth grade defending typified the DC road no-show, but the sad part was that we as fans were no longer surprised. That night, however, some of the players finally decided they’d had enough.

Saturday night in Chicago has been widely described, even by some of its participants, as "ugly". That game wasn’t ugly. It was a win. Wins, like babies, cannot be ugly. Just take a look at that beautiful result! Two lovely goals, and three happy, bouncing points. Now Columbus, that was ugly. Columbus was pustulant, seeping-wart ugly on pasty spare tires of cascading, middle-aged flab.

Chicago (aside from the hopeless cameraman who missed the first DC goal) was a game of great beauty for latter-day students of the DC road experience. Was it not beautiful to see those Chicago attacks neutralised time and time again? Did it not please the eye to see the comeback after the here-we-go-again goal that was conceded in the sixth minute? Did you not appreciate the realisation of the soccer work ethic, whereby not a single player hung his head, gestured at a teammate or slouched around disinterestedly, out of breath and out of position?

Of course, beauty is a highly subjective concept, and a neutral or a Fire fan may care to disagree, but a solid, high Petke header out of the back, a deft Prideaux interventionist toe, the new-found ease of Namoff on the ball, and the whistling accuracy of the crosses from the mercifully less querulous Stoichkov were all works of art from where I was sitting. No one let the side down (there was no DC substitute until the 88th. minute), and no one bottled out. When you think back over the past three and a half seasons, these are all big aesthetic plus points.

It doesn’t take a genius to connect the away results in Dallas and Chicago with the changes in the line-up and the gritty attitude that came with it. And the satisfaction from these victories, assuming that MLS isn’t wacko enough to punish DC for a referee’s mistake in the Dallas game, is all the greater because they were hard-fought successes. If Chicago had rolled over and let DC score five, you could have viewed it suspiciously as a one-off, freak result. As it was, the last undefeated home side in the league was made to look mediocre on its own ground, and the results were earned with honest sweat over every inch of the crappy plastic pitches they were played on.

"A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful," said the Austrian writer and satirist Karl Kraus. This applies to soccer teams too. Not every player can pass the ball like Stoichkov, but then players like Stoichkov can rarely tackle and graft like Petke or Ivanov. The beauty lies in the balance. Let’s hope this balance remains undisturbed.