His FA Cup runneth over

LONDON -- Here's a brazen breach of sportswriting etiquette: We won.

I mean, to Hades with objectivity: We won.

Yeah, we beat Cardiff City, 1-0, in the final of the venerable FA Cup in chilly Saturday drizzle at Wembley Stadium, meaning the world's oldest soccer tournament has gone for the first time since 1939 to Portsmouth, a club from England's south coast or, you know, "we."

Not everybody can use the "we," but I received judicious permission in April 2007, after a match, in a pub, from a blue bear.

To explain, I moved to England in 2006, carefully chose a favorite club from the celestial Premier League and wrote a book about resuming fandom after decades of press boxes, with the American version due out in August and titled "Bloody Confused! A Clueless American Sportswriter Seeks Solace in English Soccer."

Avoiding the route of choosing from among the mastodons Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea or Arsenal, I sought unpretentious grit and uncommon exuberance, and found it in a bandbox of a stadium near the English Channel, Fratton Park, the beautifully decrepit home to Portsmouth, or "Pompey."

Buying tickets as do real people, riding trains to matches, hearing impromptu songs, marveling at the corrugated steel of the English stomach that can blithely hold a vat of beer even well before a 3 p.m. kickoff, I came across an extraordinary human dressed as a blue bear, with a Portsmouth insignia on the furry chest.

I first spotted him in February 2007 on a train and then on a bus clearing a fogged window with his right blue paw. I soon knew the distinctive honor and digestive rigor of pubs and stadiums with the phenomenal Charlie Allum (bear), the glorious Dan Pawsey (friend of bear) and the luminous Dylan Hopkins (friend of bear), all then 27, all with Pompey in their corpuscles.

Smelling Portsmouth's hugest day since the back-to-back titles of 1949 and 1950, the bear set apparent ursine air-miles records last week by flying from his current habitat of Sydney, 31 hours with a night-long stopover in Abu Dhabi. By Saturday afternoon, we'd all reconvened in front of the world's greatest stadium, and those three filed in.

I headed for a Wembley pub.