Saturday night is the end of an era for Minnesota United FC. It's likely the team's last game in the second division, but it's also the team's final game in Blaine, at the National Sports Center.
The team has had two different tenures there, but for the most part the NSC has been the home of Minnesota pro soccer for two decades. Games at the Nessie, as the stadium was dubbed by fans, always felt more like an overgrown high school football game than a real-deal pro sporting event. For me, who grew up playing football on the windy, poorly lit fields of the western Minnesota prairie, the NSC felt like home.
In some of the lean years, games felt less like celebrations and more like a support group, with a few hundred arguably unwell people gathering to commiserate about their shared addiction. Any longtime United fan has at least one story of waiting out a summer thunderstorm, or a fall downpour, to watch Minnesota slog through another dour 1-1 draw or 2-0 loss.
Over the past few years, though, the NSC has come to feel less like a resting place and more like the starting blocks for Minnesota pro soccer. As the team's move to Major League Soccer changed from a possibility to a certainty, the NSC transformed itself into a north-metro destination. Crowds that sometimes reached five figures flooded through the gates, and food trucks ringed the field, a carnival with soccer at its center but MLS promise as its prize. The fans roared, but the games sometimes felt like practice for the future.
All that becomes a memory after Saturday's game with New York.
If I could pick a single memory to take with me to TCF Bank Stadium in 2017 and to the Midway neighborhood stadium in future years, it would be of the first leg of the 2012 NASL finals. Minnesota went on to lose that championship, in a penalty shootout, but the first leg against Tampa Bay was a party. It was a classic cold, windy October evening at the NSC.
Minnesota led 1-0 for much of the night, but in the closing moments, Simone Bracalello swung in a corner kick. Connor Tobin met it; Martin Nuñez, at the back post, may have helped it in. Whatever the cause, the ball crossed the line, and the goal touched off pandemonium in the Dark Clouds supporters section. The players ran to the fans' section to celebrate, the advertising boards fell down, and for one moment, fans and players celebrated together on the east sidelines of the NSC.
Next year, and in years to come, the games will be life-or-death and the players will be remote unknowns. But for that moment, at the National Sports Center, the fans who rode out the thunderstorms and the players who would bridge the gap from Thunder to United both came together, on the sideline, for one more memory.