Dread it, run from it, Team Vitality arrives all the same.

Team Spirit, built around two of the world's best players (with one in particular being every Counter-Strike player's nightmare), has fallen to Team Vitality in the semi-finals of the Budapest Major.

It turns out that dealing the killing blow to a team of four superstars is easy, but an angry Frenchman capable of pulling his team back from the brink was too much for old chopper.

That's not to say Team Spirit didn't try, though. They were up 12-6 before Vitality remembered how to play, with a combination of ZywOo and beloved British rifler mezii kickstarting the comeback. The French and the English, who knew such a crossover could yield something so beautiful?

With ropz coming alive as well, it seemed like there was nothing Spirit could do.

It wasn't all plain sailing, and a last second bomb plant denial by mezii in round 23 kept the dream alive.

When The Hornets stumbled and the map pushed to a second overtime, chopper somehow managed to pull off a 1v3 on the A site, complete with a bomb defusal. We can only assume that was the product of a blood sacrifice taking place somewhere in the world.

Despite chopper's heroics, his repeated attempts at calling "Split A" and "donk go kill" weren't enough to overcome apEX's band of merry men, finalising at a 19-17 scoreline.

Unfortunately for Spirit, Dust2 had no chopper-based heroics at play. It began as a back-and-forth affair, with a respectable 6-6 scoreline at the half. After that, chopper — and the rest of Spirit for that matter — were nowhere to be seen, and their CT side crumbled. Spirit managed to somehow stumble their way to two more rounds, but Vitality ran away with the rest, and they booked themselves a place in the grand finals with relative ease.

Someone, somewhere, is flying back to Serbia tonight. They'll sniff, cough, and say...

Smells like Team Spirit.