Landon Donovan had not won this award before?

Were they giving the MLS Most Valuable Player to other guys just as a sort of goof? To mess with us? And him?

“And the winner is, Land … Hey, got you again! The winner is Luciano Emilio!”

Or Guillermo Barros Schelotto! Christian Gomez, everybody!

Amado Guevara!?

Taylor Twellman? Preki??

Honest. All those guys were MVPs of the MLS over the past six seasons. When Landon Donovan was not.

Clearly this has not been a truly serious award. Not if Landon Donovan, Face of MLS, has never won it. Till now.

Donovan got the award, officially, on Thursday.

In the defense of MLS and its MVP voting members (some unclear combination of players, coaches and media members) … It would have been hard to give the award to Donovan early in his career, when he was little more than a kid, and he led the San Jose Earthquakes to MLS Cup victories in 2001 and 2003. Or in 2005, when he was with the Galaxy but they didn’t play all that well before catching fire in the playoffs and Donovan was on another championship team.

Then the Galaxy didn’t make the playoffs at all for three seasons, two of them wrecked by  experiments in weird chemistry concocted by Mad Doctor Alexi Lalas and his boss, Tim Leiweke. Firing coach Steve Sampson, hiring FrankYallop, the whole David Beckham Experiment beginning in the summer of 2007, the ridiculous concept of hiring Dutchman Ruud Gullit as coach in 2008 when he probably had never seen an MLS game in his life …

And, OK, you can’t make Landon the MVP when his team doesn’t make the playoffs, even when he’s riding a coaching carousel and the franchise is blowing up the roster around him about twice a season.

Finally, the Galaxy got Bruce Arena in town, and Bruce loves Landon and Landon loves Bruce,  and then the club got rid of Lalas and let Bruce run the team, and David Beckham was nudged into line as a contributing player to Landon Donovan’s team (and not the other way round, as Becks tried to have it in 2007-08).

And now here we are, Landon Donovan, almost certainly the greatest attacking player to hold a U.S. passport, six-time best national team player according to the people who vote for the Honda Award … finally, finally winning an MVP triphy from MLS.

OK, one more excuse we will throw out to MLS for this oversight. (We’re feeling charitable.)

Donovan has been such a critical component of the U.S. national team that he has missed whole chunks of the MLS season for, well, his entire MLS career.  Hard to put up numbers when you’re playing Italy in Germany 2006, etc. Easier to give the award to some past-his-prime import who spent the whole season States-side and scored a few more goals and, anyway, since he’s not American he must be better.

OK. Rant over. Landon Donovan has won, and he deserved it. The Galaxy is in the MLS Cup in large part because Donovan took over the team and the captaincy from Beckham, and the club responded to his leadership (and to Arena’s, which was channeled through the little guy from Redlands).

As we wrote a few months ago, Donovan has never been better. At 27, he still has most of his physical gifts, and he’s smarter than ever. He is so important to the national team that his absence over the past week was painfully obvious in two limp defeats to middling World Cup qualifiers (1-0 at Slovakia, 3-1 at Denmark).

He is the focal point of the Galaxy, the best-known player in U.S. soccer history and its best player for almost a decade now.

He has never been more valuable. It was nice of MLS to notice.