I have a friend, let’s call him Mike (not his real name), who is a fan of the Loons. He’s not a Minnesota United dilettante; he has strong opinions about Franco Fragapane, and he’s the type that can name every backup fullback on the roster. He lives outside the metro, so he doesn’t get to come to as many games as he’d like, and he has a young family, so there are occasional bedtime-related issues to put a damper on his TV viewing.

What I’m saying is that he might not be a card-carrying MNUFC sicko, but he’s definitely in that next tier: serious fandom, someone who cares a lot about the Loons, as much as he cares about the Timberwolves and every other one of his favorite sports teams.

And he doesn’t have MLS Season Pass.

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It’s the fifth year of Bob Motzko’s tenure as the head coach of the Gopher men’s hockey team, and the second consecutive in which Minnesota has won the Big Ten championship and reached the Frozen Four.

This seems pretty good, all things considered, but we need something a little more scientific to determine just where he ranks in the pantheon of Gopher coaches. Luckily, we’ve got just such a scientific system, which I just made up, but which I consider to be better than any other system ever designed to rank the first five years of every Gopher men’s hockey coach’s tenure (subject to further review of the literature). Here it is.

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Three games after Karl-Anthony Towns’s return to the Timberwolves lineup, one thing is clear: it’s time for the Wolves to win something.

Note that this is a far cry from saying that this is the Wolves’ time to shine, or that the Wolves are going to win something - only that there’s an urgency for this particular team to achieve, because suddenly it seems like this might be as good as things are going to get.

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It’s easy to say that Minnesota United is a different team without Emanuel Reynoso in the lineup. After four games, though, we’re seeing just how different, and how the team has changed its methods.

What we’ve discovered is that, rather successfully, Minnesota United has become Burnley FC.

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It was another iconic snow opener for Minnesota United, a night that will live on in images: Kervin Arriaga making a snow angel during warmups. Michael Boxall and Kemar Lawrence refusing to wear long sleeves or gloves. The grounds crew, wearing shorts, clearing the snow with leaf blowers. It was a night to remember, a night for photos and warm clothes and another edition of soccer in the snow in St. Paul. Iconic, right?

Unless you were playing or coaching, that is. Then you were peeved.

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MNUFC was stuck with one of the weirder schedules in Major League Soccer this year, in that their bye week - every team will get one this year, because there are an odd number of teams in the league - came in week two. And so the Loons won their season opener in Dallas, then immediately got two weeks off. But now, finally, it’s time for Minnesota’s home opener, so here’s a look at the three headlines that we’ll all be talking about this weekend.

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If you’re an MLS Season Pass subscriber on Apple TV (or a season ticket holder, or a T-Mobile customer), and you’ve watched the Minnesota United FC-related content that’s already part of the subscription, you’ll note a certain historical angle to the coverage - full of references that date back past the Loons’ entry to MLS in 2017, back past owner Dr. Bill McGuire purchasing the team before the 2013 season, all the way back to when the team was the Minnesota Stars.

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Longtime listeners of The Sportive will know how fond I am of bringing up the case of former Timberwolf Josh Okogie. The now-24-year-old might be the single most exciting defensive player I’ve ever seen in the NBA. He is capable of things on defense that don’t seem possible, like he’s warping space-time. I am thinking of plays like this, where Okogie falls behind Justin Holiday as Holiday drives the lane, and as Holiday leaps to shoot, Okogie somehow A) catches up to him from behind and B) leaps up to block the shot, all during the split-second that Holiday is in the air. Holiday didn’t slow down! Okogie just sped up, somehow!

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Minnesota United held a press conference with manager Adrian Heath on Tuesday, so we got a few details about what’s going on with the club, eleven days before the Loons kick off their season in Dallas.

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Sports fans in North America have more major leagues, like truly big-deal major leagues, than anywhere else on the planet. The NFL is obviously the dominant one, and most countries have a similar dominant league - the Premier League in England, Serie A in Italy, the IPL in India, and so on. But beyond the dominant one, North America’s got just a fascinating collection of other leagues.

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