Breakdown of Se nós conseguíssemos a vitória, o campeonato seria nosso.
ser
to be
nós
we
nosso
our
conseguir
to manage / to get / obtain
se
if
a vitória
the victory
o campeonato
the championship
Questions & Answers about Se nós conseguíssemos a vitória, o campeonato seria nosso.
Why do we use conseguíssemos and seria here?
This sentence uses a second conditional clause to talk about a hypothetical or unlikely situation ("If we achieved..."). To build this, the "if" part of the sentence (Se nós...) takes the imperfect subjunctive (conseguíssemos), and the main result takes the conditional tense (seria).
Why does conseguíssemos have an accent on the i?
In the imperfect subjunctive, the nós form always has a written accent on the vowel right before the -sse ending. This is because the spoken stress falls on the third-to-last syllable (making it an "esdrúxula" word), and Portuguese spelling rules require all words stressed on the third-to-last syllable to have a written accent.
Could I use the imperfect tense instead of the conditional seria?
Yes! In everyday spoken Portuguese, it is very common to replace the conditional with the imperfect indicative in the result clause. You will often hear people say ...o campeonato era nosso instead of ...seria nosso. Both are perfectly correct and mean "...the championship would be ours."
Usually we put o or a before possessives. Why is it just nosso at the end?
When a possessive word (like nosso, meu, or tua) comes directly after the verb ser (to be) to state who something belongs to, we drop the definite article. So we say o campeonato seria nosso, not seria o nosso.
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