By Gus "Walk-Off" Fields
Inter Miami hadn't won in five matches. Lionel Messi fixed that in one night, and then some.
Messi scored four goals as Inter Miami beat CF Montréal 7-1 on Saturday, a club-record margin of victory, according to ESPN and Al Jazeera. The four-goal haul pushed his season tally in MLS to 18, per Al Jazeera's count, and snapped the winless skid in about as emphatic a fashion as a team can manage.
There isn't much mystery left in what Messi does to overmatched defenses when he's fully switched on — it's been the same story since he arrived in South Florida — but a club-record scoreline is still a club-record scoreline, and a five-game drought is the kind of thing that gets a locker room whispering. Saturday ended the whispering.
Neither ESPN nor Al Jazeera's dispatches detailed the other scorers in Miami's seven, a gap worth flagging rather than filling with guesswork. What's clear from both accounts is the shape of the night: Messi at the center of it, a struggling team suddenly reminded of what it has, and a scoreline that will sit atop the club's record book for a while.
For Inter Miami, the timing matters as much as the number. A winless run has a way of curdling a season's momentum; a night like this one has a way of resetting it. Whether it does will show up in the next five matches, not this one.
Final score's the last thing that mattered here.
— Compiled from reporting by ESPN and Al Jazeera.
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