This post is part of the From the Terraces blog that runs in the English section of the website, but it is such an important story that it is featured on the front page.

It all started at lunchtime on a gorgeous March day at the iconic Pike Place Market in Seattle. An American freelance journalist by the name of Matt Negrin was visiting the Emerald City Supporters (ECS) and had scheduled an interview with two of their leadership guys Aaron Reed and Glenn White. The plan was to write a feature article on the supporters of the Seattle Sounders, and in particular the rivalry between the Emerald City Supporters and the Timber Army who support the Portland Timbers a few hours from Seattle down the I-5 highway. That indeed happened, and you can read the excellent results: Burn, Destroy, Wreck, Kill – Soccer’s Pig War Produces Spies and Battle Cries in the Pacific Northwest. However, this is not the story I’m going to tell here.

Being the good journalist that he is, Matt ended the interview with Aaron and Glenn by asking: “Is there anything else that we should talk about?” This is what every journalist is taught to ask at the end of every interview. Typically the answer is no, and you are done. This time, however, the reply was a bit different: “Well, if you really want a good story…” they started. And the rest is in Thursday’s edition of The New York Times.

Matt ended up hearing about the demise of Tampere United in 2011 and the subsequent restart of the club under the new TamU-K moniker. He heard how we had gone from a Finnish first division club that regularly played in European competitions into a club that played on a dirt field in a recreational league. He also heard how our club started growing from that humble beginning, and how our first team still plays in front of passionate supporters. The night of our first promotion in 2012 was discussed in particular detail: more than 400 people filling the atmospheric Pyynikki Stadium and the supporter group Sinikaarti singing loud and proud. The ECS people in Seattle had a particular connection to this match as it was streamed live, and dozens of them watched the match in pubs and homes in and around Seattle.

But I guess what impressed Matt the most is how the supporters never gave up and attended every single match as a group, singing and chanting for their team. And of course, the recently added youth teams must have caught his attention as well. Back in 2011 everybody thought that Tampere United would disappear altogether, but here we are in 2014 playing with three adult teams and six youth teams. We have to play under the new name TamU-K, but in everybody’s hearts and minds here within the club we are still Tampere United.

On March 10th Matt wrote an email to me, and essentially said that he wants to come over and tell our story to the world. I was ecstatic! This is the kind of contact we had been waiting for. Granted, we expected it to come from one of the few national media outlets here in Finland, but all the better if we could tell the story to the wider world. ”I’m happy to say that I think I’ve found the greatest football story in the world,” Matt wrote, and I knew we had hit the jackpot.

Only I had no idea how big of a jackpot it was going to be. Initially it was not clear where Matt’s story was going to go. He talked about a book on football supporters around the world that he was preparing, but I always assumed our story would be a blog post somewhere like SB Nation, where the ECS story appeared. We kept on writing emails back and forth, and suddenly on April 5th the hammer hit: ”I told an editor at The New York Times about this,” Matt wrote, ”He was interested.” I could not believe my eyes. There’s just no way! The only thing I could write in response was ”The NYT story would be amazing!” Thinking back to it, I must have seemed like I was the coolest person ever, taking news of global exposure seemingly as not a big deal at all.

I can tell you though that when I heard on Thursday last week that The New York Times had picked up our story, my reaction was a lot less cool. I was actually at a work meeting at the time, but was constantly checking whether Matt would have the news on the NYT editor’s decision. When I got Matt’s email about the green light from NYT, I could not really start shouting and dancing like I wanted to, but I responded to Matt with a few expletives of excitement.

Over the past few years we have offered our story to a few media outlets here in Finland, but apart from the Moro supplement in the local Tampere paper Aamulehti, nobody has bitten on our pitch to run a feature on us. It feels strange and utterly awesome that it was The New York Times that picked up our story. We always wanted this story to be told to as many people as possible, and personally I dreamed about national exposure. Obviously the global exposure provided by The New York Times is beyond our wildest dreams. And yet, after the fact, it is not hard at all to see why The New York Times wanted to feature us. Indeed, Matt told me early on that he was surprised that nobody had told our story yet. “It is the ultimate inspirational story”, he said. I don’t think anybody will be able to deny that.

The past week has been an amazing ride. I have set up several interviews and meetups for Matt, and he has turned out to be a great guy to hang out with. Obviously the fact that I get to constantly talk about my biggest passion makes our interaction very easy. I’ve introduced Matt to several key figures in the club, and a few of the interviews have lasted for several hours. It has all been surreal, but I’ve been having the time of my life.

One of the things I keep telling to everyone who is involved with TamU-K is that we should not worry about things that are far in the future. Our club has been growing so fast that trying to figure out where we might be in six months has always been a futile attempt. We constantly run into surprising developments that nobody could have expected, and I think in the next several months it will be more true than it ever was. I’m sure that we will all enjoy the ride.

And as for Matt, he told me that before coming to Finland he really did not have a football club that he supports. Now he has found one that will be a part of the rest of his life. As he was submitting the article to the editor at The New York Times, he was singing our Tampere United chant to the tune of Carnival De Paris. Ain’t that something?