In high school I had a Mexican friend who was the only person in my school whose love of soccer was as passionate as mine was at a time when everyone else wasn't all that interested and only knew what they knew through playing FIFA here and there. One day after school I went over my friend's house like I did so often to play FIFA. Usually it was just me and him playing each other or playing two v. two together against some other people on XBOX Live but after an hour of playing FIFA, the doorbell rang. At the door was his girl cousin who had come to visit from hours away. My stupid friend totally forgot that she was coming to visit. He introduced us and all that and then we went back to his room to play FIFA until his mom got home for dinner. Me and my friend were playing for a while but then his girl cousin asked if she could play. He stopped playing and let her play me. She went with Arsenal and I chose Liverpool. At the end of the match I found myself cruising forward down the left side with Riise. We had been talking throughout the game while playing and as I was rampaging towards the goal from the halfway line and readying for a Riise Rocket, she said this:

"I've always loved Riise. He gets out of the back so well."

I heard this and doing so made me hold my thumb down too hard for a shot and I knocked the ball into Row Z. No one in my school other than me and my friend would have been able to decipher the sentence "He gets out of the back so well" if someone made it talking about soccer. They just wouldn't have got it. We all know here that it means to move forward out of defense well but just the way that she said it and in those terms that only a real fan of the game would know made me lose focus due to my instant attraction to her and in the moment I ballooned my shot.

Never saw her again after that day but I never forgot that line of hers.