Three-plus decades in this business, and I still can be surprised by what can happen when you call someone.

I was working on a piece about the future of Mahdi Ali, the capable and popular UAE Olympic soccer coach who led his team to the London Olympics, and I decided to check in with the Football Association president.

(Mahdi Ali works for the FA.)

I called the prez’s England mobile with my temporary England mobile, and the message said the phone was turned off … I texted him, and nothing … and I decided to give it one more try … and I ended up with a scoop.

The lesson?

Keep talking to people. Even when you don’t believe you really need to talk to people. Just call them. Get out your list and check in, and the odds are surprisingly high that you will learn something new.

It’s good just to get sources conditioned to the fact that you will call, and just say hello, and not call only when you are pushing for comment.

I know this. I’ve lived this. But I still have the capacity to be surprised by what a simple phone call can yield.

So, on the third try today, the FA president responded. He picked up the phone. I asked him about the timetable for hiring a senior national coach — the UAE has had only an interim coach since last September.

And the man, Yousuf Al Serkal, just … told me … that Mahdi Ali would be the senior-team coach, if he had anything to do with it (and he is about 98 percent of it, actually), within the next month, and then we got into why it made sense …

And to my knowledge, no UAE English-language media has had this, and maybe not any Arabic-language media, either.

Here is the story I wrote on it for The National.  A nice way to go out, here near the end of a 3.5-week journey with the UAE Olympic soccer team.

And another lesson: Get phone numbers … and use them. Sources don’t work on your schedule; they may have done something interesting when you thought they had no reason to. Turns out, when I happened to call the FA president, he was just ready to talk about promoting Mahdi Ali. It might have been any journalist who asked him, at that moment.

It happened to be me.

I know the importance of calling sources; I need to act on it more often. Just about everyone in journalism needs to.