FanHouse in the Stands: Newcastle United FC vs. Fulham FC

With some three minutes left in a crucial match between Newcastle United and Fulham, the skies – sunny all afternoon, but suddenly and ominously dark now – opened up and literally began to rain on our American parade.

Hull City was drawing with Bolton Wanderers and the Magpies (aka Newcastle United) were down a goal and a Bassong (Sebastien after an all too harsh red card) to Fulham with the clock creeping toward 90 minutes (aka full time).

We were getting drenched and the realization was settling in: once again, Newcastle was staring at a spot in the relegation zone, teetering over the abyss of Championship football.

At least, as our native Geordie friends (and bloggers at the esteemed Beyewatch!) would tell the three of us who made the pilgrimage more than 3,500 miles from Washington D.C., the most powerful city in the world, to the North-East of England and to heavenly St. James Park only to see Newcastle fall 1-0 to Fulham, we had gotten the full Newcastle experience.

The black-humored quip generated a good laugh later that evening after more than a few pints. It's the type of wry humor that can make a night out on the town (or Toon, as it were) so enjoyable.

The thing is, it almost made it sound like we should feel shortchanged. (Not the intent, of course.) Even though relegation is now likely and we traveled all that way and it just isn't fair that so many passionate fans could be dealt such a cruel fate – the least of whom is certainly me (I began supporting Newcastle two years ago as a choice, not a birthright) – I didn't feel robbed at all.

Fascinated. Blown away. Enraptured. Amazed. Hypnotized. Hooked. Hopelessly addicted.

All of those adjectives fit. The last thing I was left with was the feeling of wanting more.

The English Premier League will never be as popular in the United States as it is everywhere else. It's not our own, and Americans love their own things to a fault. (There is nothing wrong with this, by the way.)

But 90 minutes into my career as an actual spectator of Prem football (not just a silly Yank who rolls out of bed early on Saturday mornings to watch ants kick around a blurry white ball on the tube), I had the same feeling as the first time I heard London Calling by The Clash.

I wondered if I had been born in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wished then that I could see Joe Strummer and Mick Jones play live. And I wished now that I could have grown up on Tyneside, a short walk from St. James Park, and been a season-ticket holder when Kevin Keegan and his Entertainers nearly won the Premier League title in 1995-96. I wished that I could have seen scores and scores of the legendary Alan Shearer's record 206 career goals for the club.

It was only a fleeting daydream. I wouldn't change a thing about my upbringing and baseball remains my greatest passion (I think), but it was enough to make me wonder.

The Premier League is that good – the experience that dazzling.

If you've gotten this far, through these ever so slightly self-indulgent words, let me explain why.

• The skill. This is going to sound snobby, but it's not meant to be. It's impossible to fully appreciate how good the players in the Premier League are until you see it in person. You can only sort of see it in television.

Go to a regular season MLS match and you will witness protracted stretches where the ball bounces around like a pinball, almost without purpose. This rarely happens in the Premier League. The touches, passes and trapping have this calm about them, but also a sense of purpose that you can't fully appreciate until you see it from a place like the Sir John Hall Stand at St. James.

• The relentless action. There isn't an American sport as captivating second-by-second, minute-by-minute as the English Premier League. Imagine a tennis volley that lasts 90 minutes, and you've got something close.

• The atmosphere. We just don't do chanting well here in the states. "Let's go Yankees" and its bizarro doppelganger "Yankees suck" just aren't very creative when it comes down to it. The Geordies have many good ones, but my personal favorite is this:

We are the Georrrrdies
The Geordie boot boys
And we are mental
And we are mad
We are the loyalist football supporters
The world has ever had

Couple the singing and chanting with the two hilariously vulgar pre-teen boys sitting in our row (every time the Fulham supporters above us chanted "Come on Fulham!" they responded with "F*** off Fulham!" and the English equivalent of the one-finger salute) and you've got an environment that can't be found in the States.

• The purity. Do you remember what American sports were like before jumbotrons and sideline reporters?

Neither do I.

But I'd like to think it was something like going to a Premier League match. There is no scoreboard. At all. Imagine the horror of having to pay attention to the game to know what the score is. Imagine the horror of having to decide on your own when to clamor in support of your side.

The Premier League is not without its modern evils of course. The money in the sport might make even Scott Boras blush (or get aroused ... probably aroused). Their stars can't stay out of the police blotter either. (Hello, Joey Barton).

But at least the game on the pitch seems relatively untainted by the likes of Ed Werder, t-shirt cannons and pixelated two-story scoreboard hands exhorting us to clap at random moments. If we need that much to distract us from the game at hand, then why are watching it to begin with?

Of course, it is not just the Premier League experience I've fallen head over heels for. It's Newcastle too. The Geordies are a proud people from a beautiful, but not well-known, area of England. They support their club with a fanaticism akin to a Cubs or pre-2004 Red Sox fan, waiting and waiting and waiting for the next trophy, a piece of silverware that, most of the time, seems like will never come.

(Newcastle United last won a significant trophy, the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, a precursor to the UEFA Cup, in 1969. While that might not seem like long time to a Cubs fans, consider that the Magpies have, at minimum, three different competitions – the Premier League, the FA Cup and the Carling Cup – every season in which to end their title drought. That's more than 120 separate competitions they've entered without taking anything home!)

The odds are against them surviving in the Premier League Sunday morning. We'll know by 1 PM ET if they've been successful, but my hopes are not high, needing some sort of result away to Aston Villa and help from Manchester United, or less likely Chelsea, on top of that.

As an American interloper, I suppose I could abandon Newcastle, given that I "chose" them in the first place, and it will become infinitely harder to follow them in the Championship than it was in the Premier League.

But then, that's not what being a sports fan is all about, no matter which side of the pond on which you find yourself.