The Wheel of Time gave me Thursday, February 16, 2017, and Twitter gave me plenty of opportunities to wonder why anyone had ever allowed me to have an account. There was a conversation about verification, a bunch of politics, and a long evening spent enjoying somebody pretending to be Will McAvoy from The Newsroom. All fairly normal archaeological debris. Then, at 4:33 in the afternoon, I told Likkit and Nos Audietis that I was still holding out for “Yacht KAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHN!!!!!!” Six minutes later I offered “Yacht Con-Air.” There it was. The important historical document. A man making increasingly stupid boat puns on the internet. Get the little brushes.

YachtCon II had happened four days earlier, on February 12, at Queen Anne Beer Hall. Sounder at Heart had filled a long, narrow, wonderfully German-looking beer hall with Seattle soccer people, green and blue everywhere, players, friends, and the actual MLS Cup. There was a line to get a photo with the trophy, because of course there was. Seattle had finally won that thing and now it was sitting there where you could stand beside it like you had both been invited to the same wedding. I was helping make the broadcast happen. I had also made the cold open, which remains one of my favorite videos I have ever made.

My initial plan for this post was to tell you about that video. Two minutes of fake VHS, The Love Boat, my friends pretending to be television stars, and an extremely stupid joke hidden inside another extremely stupid joke. Nice little post. Manageable. Then we started pulling on how I knew these people, and the thread went backward through a wine warehouse, a free ticket, my dad driving up from Portland, and a Star Trek joke that accidentally became a documentary project, then forward through Colorado, Toronto, a championship, an international fruit emergency, and a second season ticket for my family. So this one is longer. Go get something to drink. Ideally do not book a connecting flight based on any of the travel decisions described below.

Before I was standing in the middle of the Sounders experience, I was working around its edges with cameras. I had seen the Emerald City Supporters (ECS) at Starfire during the first-team’s Open Cup games we streamed. I knew the noise existed. I knew there were songs and flags and people who took the whole thing very seriously while also being very funny about it. I did not yet know what it felt like from inside. There is a substantial difference between observing a large group of people lose their shit and discovering that you would also like to lose yours, preferably on a recurring schedule.

In September 2015, Jeremiah Oshan wanted Bootstrapper Studios to help stream YachtCon. It was a charity event, and he asked whether we would do it pro bono. I was getting deeper into the Sounders world and jumped at the chance. I remember meeting him in SoDo to talk about it, probably at the venue or somewhere nearby; the exact table has not survived. The tweets pin our meeting to September 28, and they also preserve the important business transaction of the day: Jeremiah gave me a scarf. It said “The Enemy’s Goal Is Down.” Dave Clark had made it, and if you want to get a science-fiction nerd interested in your soccer community, apparently the correct procedure is to put an Ender’s Game reference around his neck. Dave and I became good friends later, including working side by side when I was with the Rainiers, but at this point I hadn’t even met him. One of his ideas had arrived first.

The 2015 event was YachtCon XV, the first YachtCon I worked on, at Full Pull Wines in SoDo. People stood around tall tables drinking wine. It was much smaller than the beer-hall version that followed, relaxed and comfortable, with the minor production complication that a wine space is not necessarily an auditorium just because you have decided to put microphones in it. I remember bringing our PA speakers, and I remember the room sounding bad. I do not remember a dramatic equipment failure, because there wasn’t one to hang the memory on. The internet at a new venue was always a gamble—we relied on whatever network was there—but this time the stream went up, people wandered in and mingled, and it held. A perfectly functional broadcast. Terrible material for an exciting technical anecdote. Excellent material for having a nice afternoon.

I had one wide camera locked off and was on the close-up camera. Greg Young was there; whether he was also the person handling audio is one of the details my brain has declined to renew. Jeremiah sat with Dani Foxhoven and Bill Predmore for the Reign panel, and with Steve Zakuani, Adrian Hanauer, and Roger Levesque for the Sounders panel. It was a fairly ridiculous amount of soccer access to fit into a room full of wine. The 2015 stream survives, which is nice, because the video can remember the furniture and I can remember enjoying myself.

Before that event, Jeremiah and I had also gone to Starfire to record an interview with Brad Evans. Alecia came along to assist, making four of us: Brad, Jeremiah, Alecia, and me, with two cameras pointed at the guys in the main-field stands. Brad was wonderfully chill. He and Jeremiah already knew each other well enough that it felt like a real interview without the awkward warming-up period of two strangers pretending they weren’t being recorded. I had lav mics going into my Zoom H6, the cameras were locked off, and I was collecting extra shots with my phone. Then a plane started coming overhead.

Around 3:45 in the shorter cut, you can find the moment I still love. Hearing the plane in person, I whipped out my iPhone, pointed it up, filmed the plane, then tilted down and moved through the cameras on their tripods to reveal Brad and Jeremiah. The interruption became the shot. I didn’t arrange for an aircraft to fly over the interview. Bootstrapper’s pro-bono budget did not extend to aviation. I just had a phone and an opportunity, and that is often plenty.

When YachtCon ended on Saturday, October 24, I tweeted that it was the most fun I’d ever had at a soccer conference, with an asterisk, and that I was sad I couldn’t go to the match the next day with my new friends. Likkit went to work on that problem. He gave me a choice between regular seats and general admission. My response was: “so, either wade in or jump in the deep end? I’m an adventurous fella, I’ll go with jumping in.” That was my wording, not a sales pitch he delivered. He offered ticket options. I supplied the unnecessary aquatic metaphor. This was, after all, the immediate aftermath of YachtCon.

By Sunday morning, October 25, the ticket transfer had arrived. I thanked Likkit and @justicar and promised to wear my scarf and scream very loudly. Then I asked, “Where do I stand and which way do I face?” You may laugh, but these are extremely useful questions when first entering a new religion. I met Nathan Murphy before the game, did the March to the Match with him, and wound up in GA for Sounders versus Real Salt Lake. I had seen supporters at Starfire. CenturyLink was a different magnitude entirely. Singing, bouncing, flags, the whole immense thing happening around me and including me. During the call-and-response, we yelled “SEATTLE!” and the rest of the stadium answered “SOUNDERS!” I turned to Nathan and said, “I’m controlling the stadium with my voice!” That sentence made it into a tweet, too. My first day as a supporter and I had already discovered a superpower.

The very next home match, November 1, was going to be with Heidi, but she had a nasty migraine. Around noon I was trying to get Dad to drive up from Portland instead. At 12:03 I tweeted that he was hitting the road and should make it in time. He did. This part of the story does not require an elaborate reconstruction: my dad heard that I had a ticket and drove three and a half hours so we could go to a soccer match together. My second. His first. We had a blast.

There was, however, a wardrobe emergency. Dad had arrived wearing red, which was also Dallas’s color, and I told him he needed something green. We found a fan shop and got him a hoodie or something like that. I don’t remember the exact garment, and I don’t remember his initial reaction to being told his son now enforced a color policy. I do know he understood the mission. By 5:18, the tweets have us hanging out in Pioneer Square after getting him some “team” gear. One week earlier I needed instructions on which direction to face. Now I was correcting my father’s match-day clothing. The expertise curve was apparently vertical.

Ten minutes later, still before the second match, I wrote the line that should have been printed on every subsequent credit-card statement: “I didn’t realize it would be this addicting. I got the first one free, that should have told me. ;)” We went to the match, had a great time, and later that night I was home talking about victory whiskey and what an amazing dad I had. The texts arranging it are gone. His side of the Twitter conversation hasn’t turned up. My side is enough to establish the important part: by game two, I was already trying to share this with my family.

Three days later, on November 4, I made another perfectly reasonable attempt to learn a little more about soccer, and bought a domain. At 1:54 PM I tweeted: “Anyone want to give me a brief history of Sounders lore? Start with either TOS or, if it’s easier, TNG.” For anyone whose brain has healthier filing priorities, that’s Star Trek: The Original Series and The Next Generation. I wanted the Sounders backstory and naturally requested it in a format compatible with my existing operating system. Sara McNally, @ssfcvictorylap, answered. Her actual replies haven’t been recovered, so I can’t give you both sides of the conversation. We tried. I wanted the whole famn damily, as Dad used to say. What we have is my half, and my half is a wonderful little time-lapse of a man giving himself homework.

At 1:56 I answered Sara, “Sounders? Sounders?” At 2:01: “This is a great cheat card.” At 2:03, with Likkit included: “yas! It has me brain spinning.” At 2:05: “what I’d love though is a compendium of stories. I might be bitting on a project I can’t complete.” Typo preserved. At 2:08: “I’ve got some reading to do.” At 2:09: “BRB, Imma call Ken Burns.” Four minutes from compendium to Ken Burns. I had attended two matches. Somebody really should have taken my internet away.

The next bit is where the format builds itself. At 2:11: “hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….. you’re not scaring me. Varied stories means many mini episodes.” At 2:12: “which means I learn a lot.” At 2:14: “that’s an endless series. Quick edits. Quick turns. Can even have the same person multiple times to expand… options!” At 2:15: “I’ve got a bit of free time until USL & NWSL season starts.” And at 3:38: “Idea to domain purchase = 1 hour. Pretty good, eh @ssfcvictorylap?” The receipts recovered in the earlier excavation have me buying supporterstories.com for $13.17 at 3:30. There are websites that have taken longer to load than it took me to decide I needed to own this one.

The thread kept going. Nathan appeared, and I said we’d need “many passionate people.” James Woollard, @BritVoxUS, apparently wandered into the conversation too: “I think we got tweavesdropped by @BritVoxUS ;)” Then I was telling Nathan and James to “bring back creepy PA voice,” and later confirming, “that’s the one I’m thinking about.” I can’t recreate the missing replies around those lines, and I won’t put dialogue in anybody’s mouth to make the thread tidier. But the surviving opening tweet and everything after it show the movement clearly enough. Ask for lore. Talk to Sara. Imagine videos. Buy domain. Accidentally begin a project. As one does on a Wednesday.

Supporter Stories was always video in my head. That’s how I think. And it wasn’t really an interview series, despite how easily that word sneaks in. We had one prompt: tell us your favorite Sounders story. Then the person could talk for as long or as little as they wanted. I switched between a GoPro angle and the AF-100, put a bumper on the front and back, and mostly let the story remain the story the person told. Their pace. Their tangents. Their way of arriving at the point. The feeling I wanted was, “Here, have a pint while I tell you this story.” I wanted to hear it word for word. I also wanted to be lazy and not do a shitload of editing on a free project. Both things were part of the design from the beginning. Sometimes artistic integrity and not wanting to create extra work turn out to be very compatible coworkers.

The first storyteller was Hugo, the S2 PA announcer, whom I had gotten to know through working together. After that, Sara usually knew the names and faces and picked the stories. People volunteered through a form, and we went wherever a shoot made sense: downtown near the stadium, where the March starts, bars, outside, Tacoma while I was still living in Lynnwood. I filmed Sara Shields and her brother Kyle by myself at a pizza place in Yakima. We didn’t have a set. We had people, cameras, and whatever place worked. Sara McNally and I generally met at the location. I sat behind the cameras with headphones on, watching the framing and listening to the audio; she sat nearby, and sometimes just being herself prompted another story. We weren’t arriving with a clipboard full of questions and demanding everyone report to the narrative.

I was learning all of it as they said it. I loved being the guy who didn’t know shit about soccer. There is nothing wrong with not knowing something as long as you’re curious, and here were people willing to teach me the history by telling me what they had lived. It was a crash course in supporter culture with a much better social component than most educational institutions. I learned a lot and made a lot of friends. Because YachtCon had already put me in Jeremiah’s orbit, Supporter Stories also had a publishing route through Sounder at Heart. Volunteering had paid dividends. I hadn’t emerged from a wine warehouse instantly understanding the community, but I had people I could ask, people who trusted me to make things, and a way to put those things in front of an audience.

Sara deserves more space in this than a production credit. We’d known each other off and on for years. I first knew her through her husband Brad and The City, around the 2009–2010 period. Later, when Bootstrapper was getting going, our paths crossed again through creative work; she ran a letterpress company, Constellation & Co., and I remember her making coasters and other kick ass things for projects. But Supporter Stories gave us a reason to really spend time together. I was excited about that immediately. We had an amazing rapport, and she kept showing up throughout this whole Sounders journey: projects, a road trip to Colorado, the airport for 12 hours in Colorado on the way to Toronto, the airport for 12 hours in Colorado on the way back from Toronto. God, there is a lot of Colorado in this story. The point is, she was a really great friend on my Sounders journey and in life.

By November 2016, the project of understanding supporters had expanded to include getting in a rental van and driving across several states with them. Our van was called #CristianRolVan, because once you have named your transportation after Cristian Roldan, you are obliged to commit to the trip. How all the original organizing happened is fuzzy, but the tweets preserve the playlist, the anticipation, Dad taking our departure photo, and me becoming Dad Jokes Guy. One of my contributions was: “Is a subwoofer a woofer that one dog doesn’t want to say to the other dog’s face?” I am publishing that again voluntarily. Please understand the courage this requires.

We were going to Colorado for the November 27 Western Conference Final. We drove through the night and reached the hotel at 4:20 in the morning. A contemporary tweet claims five hours of sleep before I was up with a quad Americano. That is technically sleep in much the same way a garnish is technically a salad. Then we went to the match, Seattle won the conference, and we stayed singing and dancing for a very long time. The celebration continued in the parking lot, where Sara climbed onto the rental van and danced.

After the parking lot celebration, we went to TRVE first, then Punch Bowl. TRVE just had beer, and a lot of people wanted mixed drinks. That was the entire strategic analysis. Punch Bowl was wonderful: hanging out, playing games, singing, annoying the others, and staying up really, really late after a night when we’d barely slept in the first place. Then #CristianRolVan left again early the next morning and took us home through snow, mountain passes, chains, slow driving, wind, traffic, and enough road food to become its own weather system. At one point the hashtag became #CristianRaveAn. Eventually I tweeted: “Through rain, snow, hail, sleet, traffic, Subway, Taco Bell, and wind issues, #CristianRolVan has returned me home. It was a great trip.” Notice that Subway and Taco Bell received equal billing with the meteorological hazards. The archive knows what happened.

Two weeks later, we did something even more ambitious with our sleep deprivation. Seattle was now going to MLS Cup in Toronto, and so were we. The route was Seattle to Denver, a very long layover in Denver, then Detroit, then a rental van across the border to Toronto. It sounds like an itinerary assembled by someone trying to avoid ever arriving, but the airfare was under $500, with five of us splitting the van. It was surprisingly cheap. The layover has grown and shrunk in memory—ten hours, twelve, however many hours it takes before you begin to recognize the airport carpet as a personal acquaintance—but the reason for the route was simple: it made the trip possible. This traveling collection of fools had another hashtag, #USSJorstianMordan. Different trip, different rental van, same apparent refusal to travel without a player, or players-name pun.

On the morning of the final, we arrived at the hotel where we were meeting up, the players were staying there too, we saw Román Torres as we drove into town. We rolled down the windows and sang his supporter song at him. He danced along and laughed. It was a drive-by serenade, not some long personal audience with him. I can’t now give you the whole chant word for word, and I am resisting the temptation to reconstruct it from whatever version the internet has lying around. What I remember is Román being game for our nonsense. He had already been one of my favorites. Toronto was about to make the choice permanent.

Then came the match. December 10, 2016. BMO Field. Cold enough that losing a stocking cap should have required filing a survival plan, which becomes relevant in a moment. We had traveled for what felt like eons to get there as supporters, and this team had taken its own long road to a first MLS Cup. When Román’s penalty went in, the place went absolutely bonkers. Thinking about it during this excavation made me cry with joy. It still has that much force. This. Meant. Everything. And we were all there. And we lost our shit. I can’t tell you who I hugged first. I don’t even remember exactly who I was standing next to. I was surrounded by the friends I’d traveled with, and it could have been any of them. I lost my stocking cap in the chaos. I lost my memory in the emotions.

Some of the sequence comes back after that. We moved down toward the front. There was the ceremony, then the players came running over to us and slid on the grass. No one was cold anymore. They took turns hoisting the Cup, and we cheered. They lowered it. They lifted it again. We cheered again. This happened over and over, player after player, a magnificent machine with one input and one output. Raise trophy, receive screaming. Nobody appeared interested in optimizing it. I was a few rows back, too busy cheering to document the lifts. So much of this story has me behind a camera, and at this particular moment I was just there. The excitement took up all the available space.

ECS were the last ones out. We walked and sang and danced, little groups starting chants and the whole section joining in, the songbook effectively on shuffle. I’m sure there was something about having a trophy now, though I couldn’t tell you the words. Man, we were insufferable. Then we took the train, got lost trying to find our way out of the station, and raced to the car so we could race to the airport. This is where the cheaper itinerary would like to remind you that it has terms and conditions.

Our flight from Detroit was scheduled for six in the morning. At 1:40 AM Eastern, my tweet describes us heading home on the four-hour drive to Detroit, with Jake behind the wheel. That’s four hours and twenty minutes until the scheduled departure, into which we needed to fit the road, the border, the rental-car return, airport security, and locating a plane. The tweet is not a GPS track, so I’m not going to claim we know precisely where the van was at that second. We know enough. This was an itinerary with the margin of error sanded off.

Approaching the border, we realized we still had fruit from the Airbnb. I think Jake noticed it. We kept driving and threw it out the window into the middle-of-the-night darkness. Apples, definitely. Possibly an orange. Seattle had won MLS Cup and our immediate contribution to international relations was airborne produce. Then it got really snowy closer to Detroit, and Jake kept pushing forward. His handle was @JakeFromDM, as in Detroit, Michigan. He knew that weather and how to drive in it. The rest of us were from Seattle, where snow prompts the city to begin drafting its last will and testament. I wasn’t worried. I fell asleep. I think the others were less relaxed.

At the airport we went every-person-for-themselves. Everybody scattered through security and toward the flight, and once we were aboard we realized Kelly wasn’t there. Minutes remained. No Kelly. Then she walked onto the plane and they closed the door immediately behind her. I’m not embellishing that part. She was the last person on. I think we threw up our hands and cheered a little, scattered around the cabin as we were. Only later, back in Denver, did we learn that security had found hand warmers in her coat pockets, made her throw them away, and sent her through again. After the border, the snow, the station escape, and the fruit, the final boss was a warm pocket.

I don’t really remember the emotional comedown once we were moving. I think I crashed. I do remember Frontier’s seats, which felt like stones instead of cushions. We had brought home the Cup and were being rewarded with furniture from a geological collection. But Denver wasn’t entirely a blur, because Sara and I made a little victory-lap video in the airport. I think it was her idea. It was very her. My tweet said, “When @ssfcvictorylap says ‘get the camera’ you get the camera. How else would you troll Colorado besides a victory lap in their airport?” Colorado, once again, had failed to escape this story.

Sara ran around with the Sounders flag while I filmed. We worked on it together, walking around and finding places I could shoot from that would make the joke land: ordinary airport business, ordinary airport business, sudden supporter victory lap, ordinary airport business resumes. It was collaborative nonsense with someone I loved making things with. The raw clips survive; the finished little edit hasn’t turned up, and I’m not rebuilding it just to establish that we had fun. We had fun. I was there. Sara was there. Colorado was there against its will.

Six days after the final, on December 16, ECS had its end-of-season party at Lo-Fi. I hadn’t formally joined ECS yet, as I remember it, and that morning I tweeted that everyone should have a good time for me. Heather, whom I knew through the supporter world, sent me a DM asking if I’d come if I magically ended up on the list. I explained that Heidi and I had neither tickets nor a sitter. If I had a plus-one, maybe I could pull out some stops. Three minutes later she replied, “Pull out all the stops. You are both on the list.” A couple of hours later, after applying the necessary brother-in-law guilt, we had childcare. By the afternoon I was telling Twitter we’d be there.

I don’t remember that as a solemn ceremony in which the elders handed me a scarf and declared me One Of Us. It was a really fun party. Music, dancing, laughing, drinking, people getting thoroughly wasted. I probably spent a lot of it with Sara, Emily, Kelly, and the crowd I’d traveled with, but by then I knew enough people to make the rounds. I remember a swarm of Santa costumes around the area, possibly some SantaCon-type event nearby, although I wouldn’t bet on the exact event name or how that detail fits the calendar. Some players came through too. Stef may have been one of them; the guest list in my head is written on a cocktail napkin that has been through the wash. We were celebrating the Cup, we were with friends, and we had a fantastic time. That much is clear.

And then, because apparently actually traveling to Toronto and coming home with a championship hadn’t occupied enough of my brain, I made an animation of everybody else doing it. This is the supporter travel-map GIF. The dots are places supporters traveled from. I plotted the routes with Sounders crests, flew the crests into Toronto, and then sent them home transformed into stars. We went there hoping. We came home champions. Sometimes the visual metaphor is right in front of you and you are allowed to use it.

The credit matters here. Brendan Vaughn, @bmvaughn, had gathered supporter travel-route data and was already mapping it. My memory initially compressed that into the two of us gathering tweets together, but the surviving DMs give us the clearer version. On December 13, I asked whether he had times because I was thinking about making a video or GIF showing people traveling to and from Toronto. He didn’t have exact times, but he offered the raw data. I described it as “Just a simple animation of the data to show it over the course of a few days.” On December 19, I was back working on it, sending a work-in-progress, and discussing odd routes with him. Brendan supplied the data. I made it move.

At 3:16 that afternoon I posted: “Full of hope we all traveled to Toronto. As champions we traveled home.” Less than a minute later I added: “Travel data gathered and provided by @bmvaughn. This is not to time-scale at all.” I also pointed out that it wasn’t his complete dataset and that the homeward routes didn’t include reroutes. So this is a little piece of supporter art, not an FAA investigation. The original tweet survives in my archive, and the GIF itself survives too. I love it. All these separate journeys converging on one place, then heading back out carrying something they hadn’t arrived with. I had just lived one of those routes with sore legs, no sleep, and a missing hat. Of course I wanted to animate the others.

Which finally brings us back to YachtCon II. Remember YachtCon II? This was supposed to be a post about YachtCon II. By the time we were making the intro for February 2017, these weren’t simply people I knew professionally. They were friends I’d made things with, stood beside, traveled with, and celebrated with. I couldn’t give you the exact moment I became part of this world. It just sort of happened, one project and match and friendship at a time. As I said while digging through it all: “It just exploded in my life.” The video is a wonderfully silly record of the explosion.

I don’t remember whether Jeremiah first brought me the Love Boat idea or I brought it to him. Once it existed, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. On January 15, we got together and took the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge, filmed the crew introductions on the boat, had lunch while talking about all the fun things planned for the event, and ferried back. The local ferry system was the perfect partner for the joke. We wanted our version of The Love Boat, and Seattle already had boats. We waited until we were underway for the shots. You gotta have movement. I explained the concept, and everybody improvised their own little introduction. They knew the assignment.

Jeremiah rewrote the theme-song lyrics. I found a karaoke track, and James Woollard—the PA voice people knew from the stadium—came to my house to sing it. The January 20 tweet has us working on the project that morning. We recorded in my living room with a Zoom H6 and a simple mic. I was not operating a normal recording studio, and I didn’t have a proper way to give him the backing track and his own voice in one comfortable monitor mix, so he wore two sets of headphones. I think it was earbuds plus headphones. However the actual arrangement sat on his head, the solution was emphatically not elegant. The performance was.

James was having fun, but he took it seriously because he understood that the joke only worked if he nailed it. We did multiple takes. I used a mix of them; I think we worked a verse at a time, though I wouldn’t swear to that recording sequence now. I had already been editing to the instrumental track, so the visuals could keep moving while the vocals came together. Later I tweeted, “Huge hat tip to @BritVoxUS. Not sure how many takes we did, but he wanted to nail it. He did. Pro at work, that one.” There is something deeply funny about treating a ridiculous song with complete professionalism while wearing two sets of headphones in a friend’s living room. There is also something deeply satisfying about how well it worked.

The whole video needed to feel like putting in a VHS tape and watching a television show. Static. PLAY. The warning card. Tracking trouble. Then the hearts, the anchor wipes, the cast credits, the grand television treatment for a bunch of soccer nerds. I initially had more tape slips in it, then realized they were taking away from the feeling, so I stripped them back mostly to the startup. Except over my own shot. Everybody else’s introduction gets a reasonably cooperative tape. Adam “Ace” Wygle, Your Video Documenter, gets a tracking problem. As far as I know, nobody ever noticed. Money well spent. There was no money, but still.

The player and guest shots came from interviews we found online. I remember Jeremiah and Likkit helping find good material. Cristian Roldan loved pizza, so I used a shot of Cristian eating pizza. The trophy got its own cast credit: Your MLS Cup. Aaron “Aaron” Campeau put up a fuss as part of his familiar grumpy bit, then got to fly away at the end like Poochie. I think that last gag came together near the end of the edit in our group Slack, but I can’t tell you who first suggested it. Damn Slack. So much useful stupid history has vanished into Slack. I think Aaron loved the result in his own subdued way. I loved that the whole thing committed to being television while remaining an elaborate container for jokes about people we knew.

There was one more joke, almost too brief to see. Near the end, buried in the static around 1:56, I flashed a baseball card of a player in an Angels uniform. Mike Standish used to tweet something weird and end it with “points to groin,” and I had spent years responding with this same player image. I even kept an alert so I could show up and do the bit. An outstanding use of automation. I don’t remember who the player was. I also don’t remember whether Mike spotted the flash at the screening or whether I pointed it out afterward, only that we talked about it. The tweet from that evening says, “you asked for it. You’re my audience of one.” A nearly invisible joke with an audience of one, inside a two-minute video containing another joke with an audience of me. This video was a little masterpiece of in jokes.

We also made the prerecorded Cristian Roldan interview shown at YachtCon II. Jeremiah and I filmed it with Cristian at the pizza place at Starfire, where S2 was playing and the Sounders trained. Jeremiah handled the interview, I handled production, and we bought Cristian pizza to see if he’d eat it while answering questions. He knew the gag ahead of time and was game. He ate the pizza. You cannot say this was a complicated artistic vision, but you can say we executed it. Jeremiah knew people and could arrange this kind of access; I got to help turn it into something fun.

At the beer hall, Maurice was on camera, Greg Young was switching as technical director, and Brian was on audio. Bootstrapper was doing it pro bono, with crew volunteering for food and beer. I was beside Greg, nominally directing, but he knew exactly what he was doing. I didn’t have to tell him a damn thing. I mostly had to make sure the stream stayed live and enjoy the show. There wasn’t a clean distinction between working and hanging out. The people working beside me were friends too. I could see the whole room, and practically everywhere I looked I knew somebody.

The screen came down, and our little fake television show opened the event. I stood up to watch it. I remember being happy to finally show it to my friends, especially because they didn’t know they were about to hear the stadium PA guy singing our ridiculous theme song. I can’t reconstruct a precise emotional play-by-play of the afternoon. The day is fuzzy. I remember fun and laughter, the room clapping after the intro, Jeremiah thanking me and the crew, and then the show going on. Four days later I was still making YachtCon puns on Twitter, which is where the random-number machine found me nearly a decade later. It had discovered the afterglow.

The season-ticket part had started before that. The email trail recovered during this excavation puts my GA purchase in late November 2016 for the 2017 season. I had asked about two tickets at first, but my first season was one ticket in GA. I loved the singing and dancing and throwing myself into the whole thing. Then two seats opened a few rows above GA beside Kelly and Emily, who had become really good friends. When I renewed for 2018, I moved up and added the second ticket. The September 2017 email has me asking whether I’d missed the chance to add a ticket or move, and the new invoice follows the relocation appointment later that month. For once, the administrative paperwork has a fairly good story hiding inside it.

I wanted match days with my friends, and I wanted to take my kids. That second part was very important to me. I’d done season one on my own; season two needed people from my family coming with me. We rotated through the kids, Heidi, and sometimes Dad. The photos here are from different matches and different eras, including visits before that two-seat season. They’re not a photographic claim that everybody first appeared in 2018. They’re what the larger thing looked like: people I loved next to me in the stands, getting their own version of the noise.

Finn was the youngest, and when we first talked about this I couldn’t remember how many matches he’d attended. Then I found the cat-hat photo. There he is. I still can’t give you a reliable total, and the photo doesn’t need to turn into an attendance ledger to be worth keeping. He was there with me. For a project that spends a great deal of time looking for tiny surviving proofs of ordinary happiness, that’s a pretty good one.

Dad came sometimes too, which brings this all the way back to the man who got in his car in Portland for my second-ever match. I was already trying to bring family into this after one game. The second season ticket just made more room for a thing I had wanted to do almost immediately. He had long since passed the wardrobe inspection. In the later photo he is very much dressed for the mission.

Moving a few rows up didn’t mean I’d had enough of GA. I could go down and bounce when I wanted to bounce, then stand and talk with Kelly and Emily when I wanted to do that. The kids mostly stayed up in our seats. I think Evelyn came down into GA with me once. Up above it, we still stood for the whole game, danced, and sang along; we could just do it at our own intensity. That mattered. We could be part of the whole enormous thing without requiring everybody to experience it at exactly the same volume.

What I wanted to share was the joy of immersion. They don’t watch the matches on television, but the older three have fond memories of going, and Evelyn still asks me to take her now and then. We don’t get to as many games as we used to. It still caught on. They all loved being there. I don’t have a tidy anecdote about which child learned which chant first or who was the most enthusiastic. Nobody needs to win that competition. The point was being in it together.

I went looking at February 16, 2017 because a random-number machine told me to, and I thought I had found a chance to show off a funny video. I did find that. I also found a long chain of people making room: Jeremiah asking whether I could help, Likkit finding a ticket, Nathan showing me where to stand, Dad hitting the road, Sara turning curiosity into something we could make together, friends filling rental vans, Heather putting us on the list, Kelly and Emily having two seats open beside them. Somewhere along the way I stopped wondering how to enter this world and started figuring out who I could bring with me.

There are more soccer stories. A lot more. They can wait their turn. For now, I keep coming back to that first day with Nathan, yelling one word and hearing a stadium answer, and to the later days when one of my kids or my dad was next to me while we stood and sang. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I accepted that ticket. I knew I was curious. I knew I wanted to jump in.

I got the first one free.

That really should have told me.