The US men’s national team checked a bunch of boxes on Wednesday night in a 3-0 friendly win over Morocco at TQL Stadium in Cincinnati, the first of six remaining games before the World Cup finally – finally! – kicks off in November.

Just from my own mental checklist of things I wanted to see:

• Multiple high-quality shots from well-worked, intentional sequences of play.
• Flexibility and a bit of invention in midfield build-out shape.
• A few compelling performances from guys fighting for spots.
• A shot-stopping masterclass in net.

I think all those boxes were checked. It wasn’t perfect, mind you – young Joe Scally, for example, didn’t do himself any favors while Jesus Ferreira had a chance to stake a real claim on the No. 9 job but, well, you know what happened. To borrow a line from The Athletic’s John Muller, Ferreira’s going to find out just how seriously head coach Gregg Berhalter takes expected goals.

But after a World Cup qualifying campaign that was always stressful and basically never pretty, it was nice to watch the US ball out and have fun. It was relaxing.

And there’s the rub: real games are never this relaxing. I made the point on our watchalong that, from the jump, this one felt like a friendly, and Charlie Davies and DaMarcus Beasley, two guys who understand very clearly the difference between games that count and games that don’t, both immediately agreed.

Want an example of what I mean when I say “felt like a friendly”? Achraf Hakimi, who is the world’s best right back at the moment, carelessly lost the ball three times in the first 15 minutes of the game. Just gave it up. In none of those instances did he immediately work to get it back.

Think Hakimi’s that sloppy or uncommitted in a qualifier or an AFCON game? Certainly not at the World Cup itself, right?

But it’s a friendly, and friendlies are played in a different gear. My point in all of this is not to pour cold water on the USMNT’s win, but to remind you all not to jump too high or too far with any conclusions based on this particular game.

Still, though, we saw some stuff. So let’s go back to that checklist:

If Haji Wright just squares for Tim Weah instead of shooting, this sequence probably goes down as the best goal of the Berhalter era, right?

This is sort of the Platonic ideal of what a press break looks like. The US were calm playing around the backline, and they did it a lot on the night with nearly 65 percent of their passes coming in their own half (Morocco were down at 52 percent as per TruMedia via StatsPerform). Time and again the US’s calm possession sucked the visitors further and further upfield until Aaron Long had the opening to play a pinpoint line-breaker – which he did a number of times on the evening in completing 38 of his 42 pass attempts – or Walker Zimmerman had the chance to play over the top.

These weren’t blind, hopeless long-balls. On the night, the Yanks advanced upfield at a Man City-esque 1.08 meters per second.

The result from this type of thing was the US generating about .18 xG per shot, which is elite from any team in any game. Morocco generated many more shots, but much fewer quality looks (especially after a rocky first 20 minutes, defensively speaking, from the US).

Berhalter’s played around with two different build-out shapes* in his four years in charge. First it was a 3-2-2-3 with the right back tucking inside as an ad hoc central midfielder. He scrapped that after about six months and turned to a 3-2-2-3 with simpler backline rotations and a regista-style No. 6 as the fulcrum, which was understandable given how much success he had with that approach in Columbus.

(*) Understand that this almost always comes out of a base 4-3-3, which was once again the primary formation on Wednesday.

A few bad results early in 2021 forced Berhalter away from regista-style d-mids as the US slowly evolved more into a pressing team than a pure possession team. Part of that was a switch to a 2-3-2-3 with lots of the work coming via combo play from the right back and central midfielders, though again with simplified rotations compared to what we saw in early 2019.

On Wednesday night it was back to a 3-2-2-3, with a few things standing out:

• Right back Reggie Cannon, who’s spent most of his career as a fullback but most of this club season as a right center back in a back three, really was more of a right center back than a right fullback in this one.

• Yunus Musah, playing on the left of the three-man midfield, was much more of a holding No. 8 who’d often drop back alongside the No. 6, Tyler Adams. The other No. 8, Brenden Aaronson, played much more like a pure attacker. The network passing graph (Musah wears No. 6, while Aaronson wears No. 11) actually reflects that to a good degree: