When you’re on the high side of the big five-oh, you get a little more stingy with the “I’ll never forget that!” declarations. At this age, you have a pretty good notion you’ve long since forgotten an awful lot of “unforgettable” stuff.

But this setting, this game, this result … was so exotic, so unexpected and such a big deal in the country where I live and work (and cover the national soccer teams) that, yes, I will go out on a limb and call this one “unforgettable.”

The situation: UAE leads Group B in Asia qualifying for the London Olympics. The UAE has never played in the Olympic soccer tournament. The Emiratis made it to the 1990 World Cup but have done nothing particularly significant before or since. This is a big opportunity to change that.

However, the home team is Uzbekistan, and they also have never played in the Olympics, and they are a rising power in Asian soccer,  and they are playing at home, and it is cold but not freezing, and it rained all of the night before. And the field is soggy, and the Ubzeks know about soggy fields and the Emiratis do not. (In the photo above, during the playing of the UAE national anthem, you can see their players still wearing black coats about three minutes before kickoff.)

A draw is enough for the UAE to win the group and go to London. An Uzbek win, however, sends them, instead.

Huge crowd, 10,000-capacity stadium packed, everyone wearing black (an Uzbek thing? A Tashkent thing?), and everyone roaring every time an Uzbek player has the ball at his feet. Guy is 60 yards from the goal, the crowd is roaring.

About 100 Emiratis have shown up and are stuck in the southeast corner of the stadium, spreading out banners with pictures of sheikhs, waving flags, wearing kandouras in weather not made for kandouras … but they are drowned out by the locals.

Uzbeks go up 1-0. Then 2-0 in the first minute of the second half. The UAE looked dead. I was tweeting, of course, which is just another form of distraction from covering an event … but I also was writing a game story to file at the whistle for the web, and I was deep into explaining what happens now that the UAE was second in the group. “They enter a three-way round-robin in Hanoi (yes, Hanoi) for second-place teams, and the winner of that goes to Coventry to play Senegal, and the winner of that … gets to the Olympics.”

A hard road. A long road. One neither team wanted to take.

Then, in the 50th minute, it turned. The UAE had been the better team technically all along, faster, too, but a muddy and slow surface hurt their short passing game. A 20-yard free kick by a striker named Ahmed Khalil made it 2-1, and four minutes later the same guy scored again after a great, no-look flick from little Omar Abdulrahman, the Iniesta of the UAE.

Now, 2-2 is tantamount to having a lead, for the UAE, and now the Uzbeks are coming forward like madmen, and the crowd is roaring and groaning, and we’ve already had four goals, for goodness’ sake, and I’m starting to get stiff from the cold up in the open-air press tribune, and the internet works only for a few minutes at a time, and my battery is running out … and now I’ve got to rewrite the story for the web … and the UAE scores on a counter at 90+3 … and the UAE bench goes nuts, and the players are prostrating themselves on the field while 9,900 men in black head for the exits …

A few minutes later, it’s over, and the UAE has won, and is London-bound, and the country is celebrating back in the UAE, or so I hear, and I manage to get some time with the UAE coach, and the captain, and the chairman of the FA board … and they’re all good, and the UAE players are interrupting their cavorting in the  locker room to come out and kneel on a rug placed in a hallway, oriented towards Mecca, and praying, five, six at a time … and when we finally go upstairs the entire UAE traveling contingent is waiting at the top of the stairs, intent on hugging and kissing the players, and having their photos taken with them, and it’s all just colorful madness, guys in kandouras, just giddy, and players beaming, and a couple of them wearing enormous wigs in the colors of the country’s flag …

I wrote about this. Of course. I wish I’d had help, or more time, but I did what I could. A game story, a sidebar and a column, in a little over two hours. (Had to get back to the hotel first to find a reliable wifi, and a dozen other weird things happened … I mean, it’s Tashkent, but I won’t bore you with details).

It’s one of those ultra-intense experiences, and when you’re batting out copy, and trying to recall if you’ve used that quote before, or if you have time to transcribe your tape, and trying to organize things into three bits of copy … well, 1,900 words isn’t “bits” is it … well, at the end you’re exhausted and hyped at the same time, and as a veteran you realize that it will be a week, if not a month, if not a year, before you really know if you did the event justice, whether you were good or just adequate.

One last anecdote.

When Mahdi Ali, the coach, finished his brief remarks in the official press conference, I chased him down the hall to the UAE locker room. I got his attention just before he got in, and he smiled, and shook my hand the old-fashioned cool way — the first part of the overhand grip. Know what I mean? Hand up, palm facing left, you grip thumbs …

And he told me, “I was happy when I saw you come. When you are here, we win.”

He had seen me the day before. And he’s right. In the three games they played that I didn’t cover, they had two draws and a loss and didn’t score a goal. I showed up in Doha last month, the only reporter from the UAE, and they won 1-0. A couple of weeks later, I was there when they beat Australia 1-0. And now I am in Tashkent, and his team wins 3-2 in a game that left every Emirati on the planet all wrung out.

I knew that they were 3-0 with me in the press box.  But I didn’t think the coach did. And then he just blurted it out. He said, “You need to go to England with us!” I said, “Maybe you need to talk to my editors.” And he said, “Maybe I will!”

Well, we’ll see about England and the London 2012 Olympics. For now, it’s a (let’s dare to say it) memorable, probably unforgettable game.  A weird place, so much at stake, five goals, a comeback from 2-0 by the visiting team, history made. That’s a great soccer match, ladies and gentlemen. A great one.

And that’s me, below, in a photo taken by an Uzbek journalist. He wasn’t quite tall enough to get me and the players on the field.