It ain't over yet for Real Salt Lake, even though everybody thought it was.

Team officials had been preaching for weeks that they needed to reach 43 points in the Major League Soccer standings to reach the playoffs. And though hitting that number became impossible after a loss last weekend, RSL somehow managed to remain alive for a playoff spot going into its regular-season finale -- albeit by a margin so thin that officials have produced a sprawling, color-coded spreadsheet to track all of the possible scenarios.

"Trying to convince the guys that we have a chance can be difficult," coach Jason Kreis said with a self-deprecating chuckle, "because we've lied to them now for weeks."

And the odds are hardly in their favor.

Stuck in a morass of six teams fighting for the final two playoff spots, RSL first must defeat the rival Colorado Rapids -- themselves needing a win to reach the playoffs -- in what figures to be a highly charged finale in front of a sellout crowd at Rio Tinto Stadium on Saturday.

Otherwise, it really is over.

But even knocking the Rapids out of the playoffs on the final day of the season for a third straight year would not assure RSL a place for itself. No, it needs a series of other results involving four other teams to go its way before it can celebrate anything. It might not even know its fate until after New England plays at Columbus on Sunday afternoon.

"First and foremost, you have to take care of your own business," midfielder Will Johnson said. "You have to win the game. That should be our only focus right now, not trying to calculate every different scenario. ... You win your game and then you cross your fingers."

And your toes.

And your arms.

And anything else you can cross, because RSL needs all the help it can get.

The easiest way for the team to make the playoffs is to have its four other rivals -- Toronto, D.C. United, FC Dallas and New England -- each either lose or draw their finales on the road. If all four draw, in fact, it would create a six-way tie on 40 points in the standings that could give RSL the No. 7 seed in the eight-team playoff field, rather than the last.

But that would depend on goal differential; RSL would have to beat the Rapids by more than one goal in the finale.

It's that kind of tie-breaking madness that makes the seemingly endless list of possible permutations of the final weekend too vast to detail here. The one thing RSL cannot afford is to have two or more of its four other rivals win their finales.

That, too, would finally sink their season.

"We just can't worry about that stuff," defender Chris Wingert said. "We just have to try to win the game. We know that if we win and we don't make it, it's nobody's fault but our own. But at the same time, in terms of just Saturday, we'll be satisfied. You know, if we can come out and put a good performance in and win the game, we'll know we did what we could, this week."

Players could have a partial indication how things are going by the time they take the field against the Rapids.

Toronto's game at last-place New York should be just about finished by then, and the D.C. United game at Kansas City will be nearing halftime. The only other pertinent game Saturday is FC Dallas at Seattle, scheduled to start about 90 minutes after the RSL game.

mcl@sltrib.com