Frankfurt am Main: Germany tries and fails to make lower Manhattan (but with better airport connections)

If it was like any other game, we’d have stayed. We’d have stayed until they had to turn the lights off and shut the gates, and perhaps only the departure of the train back to Berlin would have made us leave. We’d have stayed and sung and cheered, because that’s exactly what they deserved. We’d have stayed, and enjoyed our team, and enjoyed the game, and enjoyed what it meant to lose 5-2 and still feel like we earned a draw against a team going to the champions league, a team that competed for German championships while we were scuffling around in the Regionalliga over a decade ago.

Most of all, we would have celebrated being together.

But it can’t happen. Every week there’s some small reminder, some memento to remind us of how stupid this all feels. This week it was a big one. A game like this under any other circumstance would have brought out the best in Union fans; already people are calling it our “Century Game. And it is exactly the sensational nature of the game that made it so hard to watch in some ways. It wasn’t the missed chances or mental lapses or statistics so much as the feeling of powerlessness. It was the feeling that, in a moment of great need and great opportunity, we had to tear at our hair and scream at the TV as we watched, unable to do anything to remind our guys that we’re still here, and still 100% behind them, no matter what.

And the game was an absolute classic. The own goal—well, it was only one goal, after all, right? Years of chaotic futility in the recreational soccer leagues of suburban Virginia has rendered me immune to the shock of such goals; I’ve learned long ago that fury is a stupid response to absurdity. Max played like a man possessed and I couldn’t be prouder. Great teams need an emotional, sometimes even insane leader, and I have loved every minute of watching his Psycho T vibes. The fact that Frankfurt needed a safety goal in a 2-goal game made their victory all but pyrrhic. The zeal with which we fought for a cause others would have given up for doomed will stay with them for a long time—as it should for us.

This is absolutely a team worth celebrating. As Textilvergehen wrote, it’s sad to think of all the players who have yet to be greeted with “FUSSBALLGOTT” from a packed Alte Försterei. In times like these, how can we truly show how much we care? It’s a question worth asking, because it is exactly this care, this support, that links us together into a community, into something more than a bunch of customers meant to be separated from their money. It’s a question I don’t have the answer to, and a question I don’t think we’ll answer for this season. But I damn well know one thing: next game back, when it’s at full capacity and we’re all there, beers in hand, and the capo starts up the chants, and “Eisernet Lied” rings through the stadium during the warm up, and a goal is met not with some artificial top-40 hit of the last decade but a real true outpouring of joy and happiness, then we’ll remember what we had lost, and we’ll start to take back our soccer.