We at The National have been writing stories about American football, here in the UAE, almost from the time the newspaper was founded, in April of 2008. Plans were laid by this or that guy who had started an academy, visions outlined, success assured …

None of it ever amounted to anything. Until the past year.

The championship of the Emirates American Football League was played today in Jebel Ali, on the southern edge of Dubai, and Abu Dhabi Wildcats won the first championship, completing an 8-0 season with a 21-12 victory over the Dubai Stallions.

And if you look at the photo above … they also look like real athletes.

A German deserves much of the credit for American football’s first real season — four teams playing six league games, and then two rounds of playoffs.

His name is Kai Trompeter, and he was exposed to the American game as an exchange student in an Alabama high school, some 20 years ago. In his day job, here in the UAE, he runs a business that leases medical devices.

He and a handful of friends organized the UAE Falcons, and registered them as the national team of the UAE, and then his same intrepid band pulled off this four-team league, which seems nothing short of miraculous, given all the false starts before them.

Remember, 98 percent of the people in the UAE know only one kind of football, and it is the sort that does not involve quarterbacks and helmets.

Trompeter and his crew needed to find some players among the handful of Americans (maybe 40,000) and Canadians (maybe 10,000) in the country, and then fill out their teams with the curious — often Arabs who attended college in the U.S., or Europeans exposed to NFL Films productions via TV.

Anyway, they got the players to turn out, and to hand over a couple of hundred dollars each for equipment, and they rounded up some officials and coaches, and they were off and running. With a real league. Playing with U.S. rules. Two teams in Dubai and one each in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain.

If you study the photo, above (by The National’s Christopher Pyke), you see two guys who appear to be real players. From that photo, it could be a small-college game in the U.S. — though our reporter suggested that it reminded him more of a mid-level high school game. No surprise considering many of the league’s players, from 38 countries, had never played the game. It’s impressive they could line up and run a play.

The championship team had a few things going for it. Starting with a coach, Charles Gillespie, who grasped immediately that a start-up team needed to stick to basics.  And followed by the addition of a Michael Vick-like player, a guy from Miami with the marvelous name of Vivaldi Tulysse, who ran for 108 yards and two touchdowns, and intercepted two passes. (That’s him with the ball, in the photo.)

It was fun and a little weird to run a photo on the cover of the section that looks like real American football … and not just motley guys in practice gear, which was pretty much the history of the game here — until a few months ago.

The championship game had to be, of course, the Desert Bowl. And if I had not been working, I would have driven up to Dubai to see it. Now I’m waiting for the megabucks TV deal.

That wait could be a while.

The league is on hiatus now; any minute now it will be far too hot to play in pads. The boys will be back in October, inshallah.