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I'm not an avid soccer fan. I'm not anti-soccer, either.
I played intramural soccer in college, attended games when in high school, coached youth soccer and enthusiastically covered women's and men's soccer in various Olympics.
I appreciate the athletes, and the difficulty of a game in which no more than four thumbs are supposed to touch the ball in the field of play. With remote in hand, I gravitate toward the sports that mattered to me when I was 8.
Soccer was not a big deal in my world when I was 8. Television was a relatively new phenomenon when I was 8.
It was with this "interested but not committed'' bias that I attended my first Minnesota United game on Saturday.
First impression: Are the Gophers really willing to charge the Loons to play in TCF Bank Stadium without replacing the block "M'' at midfield every game?
TCF Bank Stadium is a wonderful place, ideal for Gophers football, more than good enough as a temporary Vikings home, but there's something wrong with the joint looking more like a Gophers recruiting centerpiece than a Loons venue on gameday.
TCF was atmospheric if underpopulated Saturday, as the Loons earned a 1-0 victory over Orlando. The weather was beautiful and, as at Lynx games, filling the lower bowl with the right amount of enthusiastic fans makes empty upper-bowl seats less bothersome. The announced attendance was 18,896.
Given any reason to cheer — like any of the eight shots on goal for the two teams — the crowd became impressively loud, and impressively organized.
The Loons have a losing record, which didn't diminish the enthusiasm of their most avid followers, the Dark Clouds, who chanted and sang for hours.
At halftime, Minnesota United owner Bill McGuire raved about the proposed stadium in St. Paul but admitted the first game there probably won't occur until 2019. So the Dark Clouds will have to get used to not sitting in their seats in the closed end of TCF.
"I thought the crowd was magnificent again,'' United coach Adrian Heath said. "I thought the noise in the stadium sounded like a lot more than 18 or 19 thousand. I think it gets better by the week.''
The crowd was given something to cheer about other than weather when Johan Venegas popped a pass behind the defense early in the second half. Christian Ramirez of California gathered it, ran through the goalie's arms like Shannon Brooks, collected the ball, deked a defender and tucked it away to give the Loons the only goal they would need.
"It's been pretty unreal, how loud this stadium gets,'' Ramirez said. "Especially when the whole stadium starts chanting.''
Minnesota United's record and the scene Saturday provided reminders that if you favor options over championships, you should be glad to live in the Twin Cities.
If only championships matter to you, you probably should have moved to Boston long ago. If you want to live in a metropolis where every almost every sport that matters is well-represented and housed, then this is the place — or at least a place — to be.
How many other metro areas feature Major League Baseball, the NFL, NBA and NHL, a major-conference college, a WNBA team, an MLS team, a popular minor-league baseball team and horse racing, with almost every sport, including Minnesota United in the near future, playing in an enviable facility?
New York doesn't count, not with the NFL teams linked to the city playing in the Jersey swamps. The "Bay Area'' comprises three disparate cities. Los Angeles hasn't hosted an NFL game in more than two decades.
Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Miami, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Denver all qualify, or come close. That's pretty good company for our self-esteem-deprived Cities. If quality of life is the number of options you have when you walk out the door in the morning, the quality of the sporting life in Minnesota is pretty good.
The Loons fill a large and enthusiastic niche.
Jim Souhan's podcast can be heard at MalePatternPodcasts.com. On Twitter: @SouhanStrib. • jsouhan@startribune.com
