In their final game before breaking for the World Cup group stage, the Portland Timbers took care of business — seeing off the LA Galaxy 1-0 at Providence Park, and booking their ticket for the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open Cup for the first time in four years.

On a night when the Galaxy threatened little offensively, the Timbers needed no more than a Sebastian Blanco goal midway through the first half to seal a last another win and shutout in a spring that, rather suddenly, became one of the club's most successful yet.

The Timbers now sit as close to a trophy as they've been since they won MLS Cup in 2015. They'll get the winner of next Wednesday's meeting of LAFC and Sacramento in a month's time in the last eight, where they'll play for just the second semifinal appearance in club history.

For the moment, though, they'll savor another fine night of work — a first win in three tries over the Galaxy this year, and one that was rarely in doubt from the first moment to the last.

That was largely because the Timbers, in a 4-4-2 diamond with Fanendo Adi and Samuel Armenteros paired together up top, started the game with purpose — piling players forward, and several times coming close to opening the scoring.

The goal they eventually did score, on the half hour mark, would be worth the wait.

After moving the ball from left to right through midfield, Zarek Valentin, Adi, and Blanco combined for one of the Timbers' best of the season so far: Valentin's incisive pass hit a cutting Adi, whose whose first time back heel found Blanco charging into the box. The Argentine needed just two touches to make it 1-0.

It was a lovely move, and the right player was on the end of it. Afforded the rare opportunity to play in the middle of the field with Diego Valeri resting, Blanco was effervescent — picking possession up deep, bursting forward at will, and firing off five first half shots including the goal.

That first half hour was the Timbers' best. Having failed to register a shot until the closing stages of the first half, LA finally began to get a foothold and almost nabbed the equalizer off of a back post corner in stoppage time, denied only when a grinning Larrys Mabiala cleared Jorgen Skjelvik's header off the line.

LA's ascent continued in the second half after changing into a 4-4-2 of their own, but they simply didn't have the players to get themselves level in the game.

By the time Emmanuel Boateng limped off with twenty minutes to play, following Ola Kamara, they were missing their seven best attacking players — the dos Santos brothers, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Romain Alessandrini, Sebastian Lleget, the Norwegian forward, and the little Ghanian winger.

The Galaxy attacking corps was decimated to the point that, chasing a goal, Sigi Schmid's final two substitutes were both defensive midfielders.

Those midfielders managed to keep the ball well enough down the stretch and stay tight defensively, but they had no means of putting the Timbers, at this point realigned into their familiar 4-2-3-1, under serious pressure.

Jeff Attinella had to make just one notable save in the final reckoning, in the 89th minute, which he did by tipping Ariel Lassiter's tester from the top of the box over the bar.

Five minutes later, it was over — the job done, satisfactorily enough, and upcoming break well earned.

This was by no means a vintage Timbers performance, but there's no question that the team continue to be in a nice groove. Their unbeaten streak now sits at ten, and their defense — so fallible at the beginning of the season — has six clean sheets in the club's last nine games.

There were other encouragements to take out of Friday evening's work as well. Most significantly, a two-forward system — one that utilizes Adi and Armenteros together — seems viable in a way that an Adi-Maxi Urruti partnership never was.

The two didn't connect all that often, and spent much of the opening period of the game trying to figure out their spacing, but they grew together into the game.

The culminating moment for the partnership came at the very end of the first half, when Armenteros flared into the left channel, cut inside, played Adi, and would have been through on goal from Adi's return if not for a last-gasp intervention from Michel Ciani.

But though they didn't set each other up, both players made themselves integral to the Timbers' attack. Adi is holding the ball up and distributing as well as he has in a year's time, while Armenteros could have had two goals and was a handful for all 90 minutes.

Savarese called the 4-4-2 diamond a "resource" for the team going forward, and it's unquestionably a good club for the coach to have in his bag — especially after two straight weeks in which the Timbers, having seen their counter attack neutralized, struggled to create offense out of their 4-3-2-1.

The two-front isn't going to be a primary look, but Savarese wants and needs more looks than the counter-attacking one that saved the Timbers' season in April and May. If the two-front is one of them, that will be a positive.

In any case, that work — the work of saving the season, or rebounding from the grueling road trip that started it — is done. This team is a contender again, in MLS and in the Open Cup, and as the weather gets hotter in the coming months, the games are only going to get bigger.