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Sounders FC season ticket holder Christine Stepherson and her husband, Josh, were traveling through Spain when they observed a crowd shuffling toward a stadium for the weekly futbol match. Intrigued, they joined the parade and attended the match. “It was the most incredible scene,” Christine recalled, “The entire stadium celebrating in unison, a 90-minute festival without a holiday.”

That festival comes to Seattle at least 18 times this year, as the Seattle Sounders FC join Major League Soccer in their inaugural season. If the opening match, a 3-Nil win over last year’s MLS Cup Finalists, the New York Red Bulls, is any indication, every match will offer an amusement park full of calliopes and clowns; the music will never stop.

Seattleites, café squatters all, have felt third rate in our continental cravings of late, looking south at Portland’s aerial tram and north to Vancouver’s impending Olympics with considerable envy. Now suddenly, with one swift strike of silver ball off ‘Man of the Match’ Fredy Montéro’s boot into the recesses of the Red Bulls’ net, it’s our urban brethren who’s envy is as green as the Sounder’s kit.

According to Brian McManus, a Belfast transplant who’s software company secured a section’s front row for the season, the Sounders offered the 32,000 fans who packed the opener with every possible element of the global game’s aesthetic, and then some.

“Giving each of the [22,000!] season ticket holders a Sounders Scarf was just brilliant,” McManus whispered hoarsely over a post match pound of Guinness at Post Alley’s Owl and Thistle Pub, the very den where the Irishman and his Gaelic cohorts had prepped just hours before. “And the parade through the streets, such a lift for Pioneer Square, a real European club feel if you ask me.”

Inside the newly named X-Box Pitch, the fans picked up the beat effortlessly. As is tradition, the majority of supporters stood and chanted en masse for the entire ninety. (Unlike most stadium sports, there is no electronic cheer prompter in soccer.) Still, one missing element was the club songs. I suggest:

(To the tune: “Oh When the Saints Come Marching In”)

“Oh when the rain, comes pouring down,

Oh when the rain comes pouring down,

I want to sing for my Sounders,

When the rain comes pouring down.”

After the eleven had saluted the crowd with an actual cast bow led by perpetually be-scarved skipper, Sigi Schmid, it was a UK journalist who put it best, “I was quite surprised actually, because these fans really know the nuances of the game, but then again, this is Seattle.”  

O-Lay!

AAA members can purchase discounted Seattle Sounder FC tickets at www.AAA.com/Discounts (click on "Seattle Sounders FC").