I have seen this too many times now to dismiss it as isolated incidents.

Remember the New York Cosmos? The soccer team from the old North American Soccer League? Pele played for them. Franz Beckenbauer did. Giorgio Chinaglia. They were a thing for a few years, in an era when North America wasn’t actually ready for soccer.

The Cosmos often played for big crowds in a weak and doomed league and were out of business for nearly three decades, following the 1984 collapse of the NASL.

But something about those Cosmos, consigned to history by most North American soccer fans … remains astonishingly popular across oceans. No, really. Global soccer fans love to talk about the original Cosmos. They get sentimental. They sigh. Over a dead U.S. soccer team.

Yes. It’s strange.

But it is a tremendous boost, in global coverage, to the reborn Cosmos, the second-tier side who began play last year, after about three years of talking about playing.

No American minor-league soccer team ever got as much positive publicity, yearning and heartfelt, as did these guys. Who have Dubai’s airline, Emirates, as their shirt sponsor.

It’s just bizarre.

Something about those original Cosmos struck a chord with soccer fans of the era (nearly none of them born in the USA), and they are ready to get all verklempt about the new Cosmos, too, despite the fact that the U.S. has a top soccer league, and it’s Major League Soccer — which the Cosmos don’t play in and can’t get promoted to.

Worse, the new Cosmos are based in a city, New York, where the MLS already has the Red Bulls and is about to launch New York City FC. While the Cosmos play in a 12,000-seat stadium at Hofstra University and pay their players $15,000 to 30,000 a year.

And, too, the second division of U.S. professional pro soccer has always been shaky. This second edition of the NASL looks shaky.

Anyway, the Cosmos’s overseas admirers better get their strolls down memory lane out of the way, because this lesser version of the Cosmos brand seems unlikely to last as long as did the doomed originals.