Just yesterday I met a fellow Gooner in a class who hailed from Peru – and that got me thinking, nothing brings great people together the way Arsenal (and the wonderful sport that is football) does. Who would’ve thought that a guy from South America and a guy from Asia would meet in North America and talk about their common love for a club that’s based in Europe? It’s experiences like this one that makes one’s love for the sport and in my case, Arsenal, even greater.

As human beings, there are a lot of concepts and things about the world and the universe that we fail to understand, and more importantly, will never understand – simply because of the sheer magnitude of these notions and phenomena.

The perfect example to illustrate this is this image of how big (or small) the Earth and the Sun is compared to other stars in the universe. It’s as good as impossible to even imagine how big some of these stars are because of how small and insignificant we are in comparison.

Time is one of these notions that we as human beings on a number of levels simply fail to understand when looked at in the long-term.

Take the 6th of September, a day of great significance for the institute that is the Arsenal Football Club. Last Friday marked the day of Arsenal’s 100 years of being in Islington. 100 years ago, Arsenal played their first game at Highbury, beating Leicester Fosse 2-1.

Let that sink in for a minute. One hundred years. One full century. It’s incredibly hard to appreciate how long one hundred years are because none of us have been around for that long (if you have and you’re reading this – seriously, well done).

But in the bigger scheme of things, I’m assuming there are very few institutions that have survived that long, and at the same time, affected so many people – particularly in the way Arsenal has.

People have said this for years and years but Arsenal are, and historically have been, one of the best-run football clubs in the world. All of us who have criticized the club in this “trophy-drought period” (myself included – at times) should do well to remember that.

Take the story of how in 1939 the players that went to war were to be given bonuses of £500 each but never received that money because of a logistical issue – the club came to realize this only in the early ’80s, tracked down as many of those players as they could, compounded the money and paid them 40 years down the line.

In this oil-money-infested world of football where values and tradition are thrown to the wind, I find myself incredibly proud of how Arsenal conduct themselves.

But that being said – this pride is not just borne out of the manner in which Arsenal conduct themselves – it is also about the experiences you have as a Gooner that make the adventure all the more interesting.

Just yesterday I met a fellow Gooner in a class who hailed from Peru – and that got me thinking, nothing brings great people together the way Arsenal (and the wonderful sport that is football) does. Who would’ve thought that a guy from South America and a guy from Asia would meet in North America and talk about their common love for a club that’s based in Europe? It’s experiences like this one that makes one’s love for the sport and in my case, Arsenal, even greater.

The experiences I’ve had over the last 11 years or so as a devout Arsenal supporter have been an incredible roller-coaster, and as someone who’s going to be of legal drinking age in the United States in a few days, I’d like to say that my ride is just getting started.

It can get incredibly frustrating, but will it ever come to the point where I’d give up on Arsenal? Never.

Up The Arsenal.