Canada's best-ever run at a men's World Cup came to an end with a 3-0 loss to Morocco in the round of 16 on Saturday.
Midfielder Azzedine Ounahi scored with two precise right-footed finishes in the second half - once in the 50th minute and then again in the 82nd minute - to help send the current African champion to the World Cup quarterfinals.
Ounahi is just the third African player in history to score a brace in a World Cup knockout match.
Soufiane Rahimi, who replaced injured star Ismael Saibari, added gloss to the final scoreline with another tally on the counterattack in the 98th minute.
Canada was the dominant side in the first half in Houston, and had Morocco scrambling with calculated pressing in midfield and aggression all over the pitch; Morocco looked to be feeling the effects of going to extra time, and penalties, in its last match in Mexico just days ago against the Netherlands.
But Jesse Marsch's side, not for the first time, couldn't capitalize to find the first goal when the game was there for the taking.
The Atlas Lions punished that profligacy after the interval, and now advance to play either France or Paraguay in the quarterfinals.
Morocco, ranked sixth in the world, scored with three of its five shot attempts. That's the best shot conversion rate (60%) in a World Cup knockout match since at least 1966, according to Opta.
Canada, meanwhile, had 11 shot attempts and as many corner kicks, but forced only three saves out of Yassine Bounou; the goalkeeper's early stop on a point-blank Tani Oluwaseyi effort was easily his best of the game.
"We were the better team. They made a couple more plays than us," a passionate Marsch told Matthew Scianitti of TSN after the match.
"They have a little bit of quality in the final third, and we lacked the ability to make a play when we needed to," he continued. "But in terms of the match plan, the idea of how we want to play football, the idea of a bunch of guys believing in themselves and going after it and ... taking them to the limit, we were the much better team in the first half and even the beginning of the second half. It was one play that made it 1-0, otherwise the game was ours."
Canada is the first of the three tournament co-hosts to be eliminated from this summer's competition.
Captain Alphonso Davies, still battling the lingering hamstring injury that ultimately limited him to just a brief cameo appearance in the historic last-32 win over South Africa, didn't feature off the bench against Morocco.
Davies underwent an MRI on Friday that came back clean after he felt something off with his hamstring in training, Marsch told reporters during his post-match press conference. But the Bayern Munich star wasn't fully confident in the troublesome hamstring, with Marsch saying Davies "didn't feel right" on Saturday going into the Morocco game.
"For Alphonso, he's learning to trust his body. As much as he wanted to play and we wanted him to play, it just wasn't worth risking it," the coach added.
Canada was also without vital midfielder Ismael Kone, who broke his leg during the group stage.
"I'm very proud. I think we did an amazing tournament," midfielder Stephen Eustaquio, who scored the memorable stoppage-time winner against South Africa in the previous round, said after Canada's World Cup ended.
"We're finally a soccer country, man."
