LOS ANGELES — Throughout the most successful season in Los Angeles Football Club history, among first-year head coach Steve Cherundolo’s spoken wishes was for his team to start games the way they closed them.

A minus-two goal differential over the first 45 minutes. A plus-30 goal differential after the break. Over the course of the 34-match regular season, this was more than a trend and it held firm during LAFC’s initial playoff victory against the Galaxy last week.

LAFC defeated Austin FC, 3-0, in the Western Conference final on Sunday afternoon and punched its ticket to its first MLS Cup appearance and will play the Philadelphia Union, who defeated NYCFC, 3-1, to win the East. LAFC and Philadelphia met once this season in L.A., a 2-2 draw.

LAFC advanced after a dominant effort against Austin, Cherundolo’s group picking the perfect moment to execute their match plan from the first minute to the end.

“I think the best I’ve seen this year,” Cherundolo said of his players’ performance in front of an announced crowd of 22,175.

LAFC dominated Austin, which beat them twice during league competition, up and down the field on Sunday.

Pressing hard against Austin’s build-from-the-back approach, LAFC attackers and midfielders closed down on the opposition and produced multiple scoring chances that, if not for goalkeeper Brad Stuver, would have put the game away earlier than it did.

“They did a fantastic job of making it difficult on us today,” Austin head coach Josh Wolff said. “It is quite clear why they are Supporters’ Shield winners and were the best team the entire year. This was another example of that. We’ve been on the other side of games like this where we can put teams under pressure like this and build momentum and smother them and that’s exactly what they did today. They didn’t give us a chance to breathe.

“They were just very relentless.”

Forward Cristian Arango picked up where he left off following his 93rd-minute game-winner against the Galaxy when a bending corner kick from LAFC captain Carlos Vela set up the go-ahead goal in the 29th minute.

The Western Conference champions would not relinquish the lead and improved to 19-1 this year when scoring first.

LAFC added an insurance goal an hour into the match when Vela, again off a corner kick, hit a ball that glanced off defender Ryan Hollingshead toward Austin forward Maxi Urruti, who didn’t notice it until it landed in the goal beyond Stuver’s reach.

“We have invested more time in set pieces,” Cherundolo said. “I think it’s only natural at this stage of the season, where duration of training and intensity of training has to be turned down. We focused more on the details of the game including some pieces. That’s Marc dos Santos’ department and he’s done a great job the past two games and we’ve scored more goals in set pieces.”

An assistant with LAFC during its inaugural season five years ago, Dos Santos is among the many people connected to the club who are familiar with the disappointments that accompanied previous postseason opportunities at Banc of California Stadium.

During their expansion season, it was a stunning defeat against Real Salt Lake in a game the club deserved to win. The following year, the Seattle Sounders clipped the wings of the first LAFC squad to win a Supporters’ Shield and secure home-field advantage when it lost in the Western Conference final, 3-1.

For all of their high-flying soccer and prolific goal totals, postseason success did not translate when the club was managed by Bob Bradley, whose teams went 1-3 while competing to win MLS Cup.

Taking the helm in LAFC’s fifth season of competition, Cherundolo, a more laid-back personality than Bradley, improved to 2-0 in the postseason and is a win away from lifting the club’s first MLS Cup.

“This is his team,” said midfielder Ilie Sanchez, who will make his first MLS Cup appearance on Nov. 5 after failing to reach the final in three previous occasions with Sporting Kansas City prior to joining LAFC as a free agent in January. “This team has his identity. And everything that we do and that we can achieve, it’s going to be because of him in the first place.”

Kellyn Acosta, who partnered with Sanchez and Jose Cifuentes in the midfield against Austin, added that Cherundolo deserves respect after implementing “his systems and his tactics, and I think collectively as a group we bought into it and he’s gotten the best out of every single player.”

Cherundolo and his staff injected pragmatism to LAFC’s high-energy DNA, and in doing so orchestrated the deepest team in MLS in ways that push opponents’ limits.

“The intensity of our defending and our pressing, and the overall tempo of the game is tough to hang with,” Cherundolo said. “It’s just been our goal all season is to push games as fast as we can because we can go fast and we want to go fast. We train that way. It’s only natural that we put the game on our terms for 80 or 90 minutes. It should favor us.”

As the pending victory party unfolded in the stands under a sunny midday sky, Cherundolo replaced Arango, the team’s leading scorer, with Mahala Opoku.

The quick Ghanian left no doubt about the outcome when he corralled an Austin giveaway prior to rolling a shot past Stuver in the 81st minute.

But this game wasn’t about how LAFC closed.

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Out of their 16 first-half shots, LAFC put six on target. Meanwhile, Austin’s frustration mounted as it accrued more yellow cards than attempts on goalkeeper Maxime Crepeau – a massive departure from their two other playoff matches when it unleashed 56 shots against Real Salt Lake and FC Dallas.

Starting at center back, Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini completely neutralized Austin forward Moussa Djitte in the opening half while the team collectively shut down MVP candidate Sebastian Druissi, limiting the talented Argentine to one shot.

By the final whistle, after LAFC supporters enjoyed chants of olé while their team played keep away, LAFC created 22 shots, 10 on target.

Austin forced Crepeau to make just one save on seven total shots.

“There wasn’t a moment when you felt like they had control of the game for 90 minutes,” Hollingshead said of Austin. “So it was cool to see the intensity of it being a Western Conference final where everybody came to win with everything they had. You could see it from the start.

“For us, a big thing is not getting lackadaisical with it and showing up next week with the exact same mentality, because if we do I think that we’re close to impossible to beat.”