LOS ANGELES – Back when I was just dipping my toe into sportswriting, an editor sent me out to a minor league baseball game to interview women in the crowd about why they’d come. Because he’d always wondered, and I guess I was the girl to do the story.

I’d forgotten about that until this past week, when I went out to an Angel City FC match to meet fans at Banc of California Stadium.

This time, it was the positive reviews that brought me out. I’ve been hearing about what a “good time” these Angel City matches were since the team’s regular-season debut in April before a sellout crowd of 22,000.

So, while I was soaking it in, speaking with all sorts of folks about their Angel City experiences, there were distant echoes of that years-ago assignment as I heard myself asking men why they were there, wearing pink and watching women’s soccer on a Wednesday evening?

And, well, duh. Like the women at the ballpark liked watching baseball, the guys at the stadium get a kick out of soccer.

Some of them have long been soccer fans, but several have only just connected with the beautiful game, pulled in by the newest of 10 pro sports franchises in the city.

“I get it now,” Johnathan Dumas said, explaining that growing up playing basketball, football and basketball in San Diego, he saw soccer scores and assumed the sport was boring.

But since he and his wife, Lindsay, a devoted Mia Hamm fan since her soccer-playing youth in Minnesota, started attending Angel City matches this year, he’s changed his mind. Done a full-on bicycle kick, in fact.

“The atmosphere, the anticipation,” he said, “it’s better than basketball, better than a touchdown. The explosion of emotion when a goal is scored, it’s unlike anything else.”

Maybe a minute later, in the 79th of the match, Savannah McCaskill oh-so-deftly got her left foot onto a cross from Tyler Lussi for the night’s only goal.

#ad “Savage on that goal!” @savyy_7#AngelCityFC | @JohnnieWalkerUS pic.twitter.com/MjyKTc1lBZ

— Angel City FC (@weareangelcity) August 11, 2022

Here hangin’ with people tonight to see it, ’cause I heard it was a good time. One new soccer fan who’s gotten hooked on the sport because of his Angel City experience: “I get it now. I get it.” https://t.co/DgBgCzoJYQ pic.twitter.com/mqDwqbjLtS

— Mirjam Swanson (@MirjamSwanson) August 11, 2022

Lindsay and Jonathan leaped, hollered and clapped – contributing to an explosion of pure glee.

It was a good time. And it was a weekday, and an exhibition to boot. Angel City was facing Tigres, of Liga MX Femenil, the highest division of women’s soccer in Mexico. The new L.A. club’s first match against an international foe was a piece of history, but not anything that would be reflected in the National Women’s Soccer League standings.

It wasn’t going to reflect the full experience, Julie Uhrman, the club’s co-founder and president, warned ahead of kickoff. No one was expecting a fourth sellout, and the 12,258 fans who showed were well shy of the club’s NWSL-leading 19,006 fans-per-game average.

Sunday’s 5 p.m. match against the NWSL’s Chicago Red Stars – one of four home matches remaining on the schedule – figures to be much fuller. It’s key for Angel City’s playoff hopes as the team, at 5-3-5, tries to climb one spot into sixth place.

Still, Wednesday’s crowd was engaged and energized, vibing to the steady drumbeat coming from the supporters’ standing section at the north end of stadium.

The attendance tally mattered little to those who were there Wednesday, enjoying an affordable excursion (well, save for the $30-$50 parking prices around the stadium) on a comfortable summer evening.

They wanted to talk about what this new team has already come to mean to them, whether they were longtime NWSL fans who’ve shifted their allegiance from the popular Portland Thorns closer to home or they came with an AYSO team for Game 1 and experienced love at first sight.

They said this summer they’ve been bringing their kids to Angel City games instead of Dodgers games (too expensive) and Sparks games (too hard to watch lately) and they wanted to gush about the team’s ownership group, an ensemble of celebrities, most of them women, ranging from actress Natalie Portman to tennis great Serena Williams.

The new team’s new fans wanted to talk about their favorite players, too: Christen Press, Sydney Leroux, Ali Riley, Jasmyne Spencer… On Wednesday, they collectively cheered loudest for the stylish Jun Endo, a pink-haired forward from Japan.

Eight-year-old Jamie Murillo – the youngest of three sisters at Wednesday’s match – wanted to talk specifically about what she’s learned from watching Didi Haracic in goal: “Diving and moving up.”

Jamie recently celebrated her birthday at an Angel City game and her family even canceled plans for a trip to Lake Havasu because it conflicted with one of the team’s home matches.

“This is the priority,” said father Jaime Murillo, admitting he couldn’t have imagined such a thing even a year ago. “Oh, heck no. Even just coming here, I would’ve said, ‘What are you talking about? No way.’ But they really inspired all of us.”

“It’s fun,” mom Salina said, with a glance at her athletic daughters, “to watch them watching their idols play.”

A real family affair, Wednesday’s match, where I met so many season ticket holders it started to feel as if there were as many of them as there were people wearing Angel City gear.

The WNBA has long left its fans wanting for cool merch. Angel City doesn’t have that issue.

Ballcaps, scarves, T-shirts and an array of replica kits flooded the place, the stands and the pregame fan fest all awash in dark gray and pink.

There also were spots of Tigres’ yellow, but otherwise I saw only a handful of Los Angeles Football Club logos – at LAFC’s home stadium. Saw just one Lakers T-shirt, one Clippers T-Shirt and one man wearing a Steven Universe T-shirt, which felt apropos, that unexpected nod to the animated Cartoon Network series that was hailed for its diverse, positive representations of gender and sexuality.

All the dudes I talked to helped make up a spectacularly diverse crowd, which is a point of pride for the organization whose stated mission is to make an impact on and off the field.

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“When you come to the game, you see little boys and little girls wearing our kits, you see women holding hands, men holding hands, and you come into the stadium and you’re going to be blown away by the way it sounds,” Uhrman said.

And coming together to cheer regularly, which is creating the sort of communal bond that the U.S. women’s national team’s less-frequent barnstorming tours couldn’t.

“It’s cool to have the consistency, to just create community,” Katy Bryant said lounging on the grass outside the stadium before Wednesday match with their sister Sarah and friend Jasmine Nguyen, having car-pooled together from Orange County.

Or as Sarah Bryant put it: “It feels like a little island of goodness and hope in a very wild world. There’s a lot of scary news out there, and it’s a little oasis. Everyone’s here for the same purpose… and everyone is welcome.”

Can’t wait for this #AngelCityFC game-day feeling!
7/30. Be there!https://t.co/UF016luIJs pic.twitter.com/5oBhaigWeU

— Angel City FC (@weareangelcity) July 22, 2022