A festival of football.

That’s what San Diego FC midfielder Luca de la Torre, a San Diegan marinated in European football, called recent events.

Two capacity crowds in Mission Valley. Two fast starts by the home team. Two first-round playoff victories. Some 65,000 fans reveling in SDFC’s six goals scored and vibing off the supporter groups’ chants, drum-banging and flag-waving.

The assertive soccer, yielding 2-1 and 4-0 victories in Games 1 and 3 over the eighth-seeded Portland Timbers, was the prime attraction.

Part and parcel with the sharp passing and shooting, though, was a charged atmosphere that affirmed de la Torre’s insistent claims about his hometown.

That San Diego is a “football city.”

That the world’s game is “in the blood of the people here.”

That, for too long, San Diego didn’t get an MLS expansion team.

Thanks to Sunday’s 4-0 victory in an elimination game, the party can go on. Come Nov. 24, when Major League Soccer’s postseason tournament resumes after an international break, San Diego FC and its fans will try to reprise the fun in a Western Conference semifinals match against Minnesota United.

The first round did complete a circle, though.

For de la Torre, the celebratory hometown victories punctuated a soccer journey that sent him from Carmel Valley to London at age 15 and brought him back to San Diego last winter when expansionist SDFC came calling.

As a boy, de la Torre immersed himself in soccer workouts under his father.

The two became fixtures on Carmel Valley fields, the boy dribbling around cones – and, at times, a dog – as his dad worked with him.

Just 13, de la Torre attracted a feeler from the professional English club Fulham via an email to his father.

At 15, he went from Carmel Valley to London to live and train under Fulham staff. The competition among amateur teenagers was ruthless. Fisticuffs broke out in some workouts as teammates vied to earn professional contracts.

The San Diegan didn’t wilt. He rose to Fuhlam’s professional ranks, yet while he built out his career in the years to come, he kept an eye on the United States, where MLS was expanding many times over.

Finally, last January, an opportunity arose in the long-championed San Diego market.

De la Torre, coming off an injury-marred season, came to SDFC on a 12-month loan from his Spanish club.

He appeared in 30 games this season, tallying five goals and an assist.

Life was very good.

“It’s a privilege to be back home,” de la Torre, writing for the Players’ Tribune, reported in May. “I live here with my wife, close to my parents, and every other Saturday I play in front of 30,000 people from my city. It gives me a lot of pride to say that.”

Now, though, SDFC’s bid for the MLS Cup trophy will face a stronger challenge.

Minnesota United, a 3-1 winner here in September, will pose greater matchup tests than Portland did. “I admire how they play,” de la Torre, speaking before the playoffs began, said of Minnesota.

It’ll take beating Minnesota and two other clubs to win the MLS Cup.

Keep in mind, for a moment, that SDFC has much bigger ambitions beyond this postseason. The franchise’s leaders have said growing into a world-class franchise is possible.

MLS still being in its own infancy, at age 30, I’ll pass on forecasting what MLS and SDFC might become. Consider that the founding years for de la Torre’s previous employers, Fulham, Dutch club Hercacles Almelo and Spain’s Celta Liga are 1879, 1903 and 1923.

Here in the colonies, let’s keep it simple. MLS is better off with SDFC in it.