The free beer was all gone when the playoff game between Birmingham Legion FC and the Pittsburgh Riverhounds went to penalty kicks.

Floated kegs and sinking dreams.

Legion lost 8-7 in the shootout to decide its first-round playoff game on Sunday at Protective Stadium. It was glorious misery for Birmingham. A record attendance of 10,227 fans were there to support Legion and celebrate the team’s first-ever home playoff game. They served up free beer for the supporters’ section, those crazy fools, and if nothing else comes from the legacy of this game then it needs to be more free beer tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Fanbases are not built on wins alone. The currency of memories, and shared experiences, are more powerful … and even if those memories might be a little blurry by the end of it all. Birmingham Legion FC currently has three supporters’ groups, but if unlocking free beer is the prize for selling 400 tickets in the sections behind the north goal, then there might be a couple more by next season.

People like wins, but I’d argue that some fans might like free beer even more.

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This is a tough job, and I take it very seriously. For journalism, for the people, I sat where the beer was free for the game that became drunker and drunker as the minutes poured out in the direction of delirium. There was a fan dressed up like Santa Claus waving the flag of Ukraine. There were shirtless fellows in cowboy hats bearing the hashtag #AllForBHM. One person was wearing a Gumby costume and banging on a snare drum. There was an Elivs impersonator, and wigs of many colors.

Most of all there, there was noise — so much noise — and it filled a stadium and my heart with pride. It was then, while in the call of duty, that I witnessed Santa Claus and his friends scream obscenities like desperate devils when this gift to Birmingham made its inevitable turn for besotted despair.

For it was around that time when the shootout began, and Legion had its first two PKs blocked by Pittsburgh’s spectacular goalkeeper, Jahmali Waite. Back and forth the scenes of sudden euphoria and crashing depression went, and that drama came after 120 minutes of agony and elation in equal measure. Legion allowed a tying goal with less than a minute remaining in regulation and then, if this can even be believed, the center referee collided with Legion midfielder Zach Harivaux in the second period of extra time. The bizarre sequence put Herivaux out of the game and into concussion protocol.

Who is the ref who gives the ref a red card? How did a club win a great victory even with its team losing so spectacularly? These are the sports riddles left unanswered for Birmingham after one of the most incredible games of soccer I’ve ever seen. Mere moments after the ref took one of Legion’s best players off the field by accidental force, Pittsburgh countered and tied the game at 2-2 in the 116th minute of madness.

An entire stadium was left wondering what they had just witnessed. It was astounding theater even before the shootout, and for that Legion won the day despite losing the night. The record crowd for Birmingham Legion FC showed, without a doubt, that Birmingham can be a big-time soccer town.

Salute to the 10,227 that made history. Next season, do it again and again and again and then that’s how the magic begins.

There’s nothing in sports like a playoff shootout. I know that now from first-hand experience. Honoring the special moment, many hands there in the supporters’ sections went upward with their single-finger salutes when Pittsburgh’s Toby Sims stepped to the dot of truth for the Riverhounds’ first attempt. Most penalty-kick shootouts go five rounds. This one went 10 after Legion goalkeeper Trevor Spangenberg made saves in rounds four and five to tie the torture at 3-3.

Legion has made the playoffs every year of existence, but it had never earned a home playoff game until Sunday. The town was abuzz. Vulcan beamed from on high. It was all so perfect for Birmingham’s pro soccer team. Three Sparks they are called, and Vulcan’s Hit Men, too. The club is four years old and competes in the second-division of American soccer, the USL Championship.

That doesn’t mean Legion is a second-rate club, though. Far from it. After expansion in 2019, the team won immediately behind strong ownership, team president Jay Heaps and coach Tommy Soehn. Heaps and Soehn are building something special for Birmingham. Legion is not a farm team for a club in Major League Soccer, but a fully independent sports franchise with dreams of bringing championships, glory and, eventually, first-division soccer to Birmingham.

These are lofty goals, but one of the best sports towns in the country deserves nothing less. On Sunday at Protective Stadium, Birmingham Legion FC delivered dreams to the city, and togetherness and then everyone shared in the pain of losing on penalty kicks.

It was Legion’s Grayson Dupont who missed his shot in the end. Waite made it look easy. From there, Pittsburgh’s Edward Kizza was up and he hammered his shot home. It was Kizza who scored both of Pittsburgh’s goals during the run of play, and after his clutch kick to win it he rushed to the supporters’ section and held his finger over his closed mouth. I can fairly report that Kizza did not silence the angry crowd.

And I could not fairly blame them.

There is something especially cruel about having to endure the stress of a shootout in soccer while coming off an hours-long session of beer drinking in the name of celebrating the first postseason soccer match in Birmingham history. Oh, what ill-fated heroes of Birmingham were these. The price of free beer, in the end, was getting punched in the guts again and again and again and then being made to drink the hot tears of cold defeat.

It was tied 1-1 at the end of regulation, and then 2-2 at the end of the second period of extra time. The brilliant Prosper Kasim gave Legion its 1-0 lead with a header off an assist by Juan Agudelo. But Kasim and Agudelo were subbed off perhaps too early, and they watched all of extra time and the shootout from the bench.

Birmingham, this is your team by forces of scar-searing poetry. They fight and fall, but proudly rise again together. The epic game against treasure-thieving Pittsburgh, of all cities, was like a tragedy in five acts: joy, anger, rebirth, burning confusion and then the pain of sudden death. A friend said to me that he had never had more fun having his heart broken, and I will raise a toast to that truth.

Sports will tear the soul from your body, but it’s in those hard-earned moments that you know that you’re alive, and that your town has a soul worth fighting for.

Joseph Goodman is a columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama: A season of hope and the making of Nick Saban’s ‘ultimate team’”. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.