Biggest sports story since I arrived in Abu Dhabi.

The UAE national team won the Gulf Cup tonight!

How big is that?

Huge. Enormous. Historical.

Worthy of climbing into your SUV at 11pm and driving down the street with your buddies, leaning on the horn, as your little brother stands through the sunroof waving the biggest UAE flag he can handle. Creating late-night traffic jams on major highways.

Worthy of the president of the country immediately summoning the Emirati team to his palace in Al Ain, where he will give the team 50 million dirhams, which would work out to about $650,000 per player, as a gift for representing the country so well. The sort of victory that will prompt the Crown Prince to telephone the on-air guys at Abu Dhabi Sports TV, after the match is over, to congratulate the team where tens of thousands of fans can hear him do it.

So, the Gulf Cup. A smallish competition, in the wider world. Eight teams from the Arabian Peninsula, and including Kuwait and Iraq.

The UAE has been playing in this semi-annual event since 1972, but had won it exactly once — in 2007, when the event was staged in the UAE.

The 2013 edition of the event was in Bahrain, and what made this particular tournament both exciting and agitating for UAE citizens, the current Emirati team showed up with some expectations. Mostly, it was the team that qualified for the London Olympics, and did well enough there — leading Uruguay early at Old Trafford, tied with Team Great Britain at Wembley after an hour, drawing with Senegal in Coventry.

These guys actually had a chance to win, and the expectations/hopes/fears mounted with each victory — 3-1 over Qatar, 2-1 over Bahrain, 2-0 over Oman, 1-0 over Kuwait in the semifinals, and on to Iraq in the final — also unbeaten in four matches.

The final was actually fun and interesting. Early goal by Omar Abdulrahman, the tiny midfield maestro who is the UAE’s best player, at the moment (and potentially ever), after a nine-touch sequence that took him past four Iraq defenders and ended with a shot banged off the leg of an Iraqi and into the goal … the 81st-minute rejoinder by the Iraqis, sending the game into extra time (which, as a newspaper, on deadline, we did not need), and the winner in the 107th minute, when Omar slipped a pass forward to Ismail Matar, hero of the 2007 Gulf Cup championship, who carried it up to the corner of the box, then knocked it back to the middle of the pitch to Amer Abdulrahman, who sent it forward to Ismail Al Hammadi, a late sub, as he charged forward … who then put it inside the far post.

At the newspaper, we covered it thoroughly. Our man on the ground in Bahrain, which was tricky to get into or to get a credential for, if you were not an Emirati citizen, filed a color piece on the atmosphere, and then did a game story, bang on deadline, and I knocked out a short column about how bright the future looks.

And then we all sat back to watch the Emiratis celebrate. The Crown Prince noted how this was an entirely Emirati victory, from coaching staff (that is the head coach, in the photo above, the first Emirati to lead the national team) on down to the last player, and that is a big deal, too.

This young team now can realistically look at doing something at the continental championship, the Asian Cup in 2015 in Australia, and maybe even qualifying for the World Cup in Russia in 2018, and that is the sort of exquisite expectations that give everyone in a football country like this one reason to expect more victories in the near future.

And here is the photo gallery posted by The National.