It was strange, really. I’ve never seen a championship celebrated before and during a regular-season game. Nor have I seen one conducted in an outdoor stadium where the temperature was more than 100 and kickoff and about 113 in “feels like” degrees.

Al Jazira of Abu Dhabi won the two most significant trophies in the country this season, the President’s Cup and the league, and they had never won either.

This is a team with some money behind it; Sheikh Mansour owns this team as well as Manchester City in the Premier League. So they decided to go full blast, which I wrote about for The National.

It was quite the event.

The highlight?

I’m going to go with the “fan Ferrari duel” at halftime.

Jazira  began this promotion back in the first half of the season. They got/bought a Ferrari Italia 458 and vowed to give it away on the final night of the season.

They conducted halftime contests throughout the season, pulling a half-dozen fans out of the stands to take a shot at the goal from the center stripe. You would be surprised by how many missed … and how many more left it fairly short.

For the game tonight, they brought back 11 guys from those previous competitions (during which contestants split Dh25,000, or  about $7,000, for making a long goal).

They put 11 soccer balls down on an imaginary line passing through the penalty spot, and had the 11 guys kick them as far as they could.

The two finalists were Jean-Paul Mangan, a teacher from Cameroon, and a Brit named Wayne.

Then it got tricky and, for any Englishman, scary. Jean-Paul and Wayne took turns taking penalty shots … or playing keeper. Jean-Paul hit his first three efforts hard and into the corners, but Wayne seemed keen to go over Jean-Paul’s head, and he barely made it on the first two tries, each going off Jean-Paul’s hand.

Jean-Paul banged in No. 3, and then Wayne channeled John Terry and every other Englishman who has choked in a shootout and … banged his third shot off the post. He collapsed in agony.

Jean-Paul was handed the keys to the Ferrari Italia 458 worth, Jazira liked to say, Dh1 million, or $272,000.

Heck of a giveaway.

The game was 4-0 at halftime, and we already had seen four Jazira goals, a pop star, a marching band and all sorts of small giveaways, including 10 BlackBerrys awarded to fans who cheered loudly … so a fair chunk of the crowd of 31,000 headed out of the stadium. It was astonishingly hot (I have never been that hot for that long; never.)

It finished 4-2 Jazira, and they finished with only one defeat for the second straight season. Afterwards, the lights were turned off and a laser-light show went on, and roadies set up a stage, and the players got medals and the club got the big ol’ plate for the championship, and more singers came out and some brave souls danced on the field. Timbaland was supposed to show up, eventually, but he hadn’t by the time I left — or by the time local TV signed off.

It was big, it was gaudy, it was long-awaited. I’m still not sure I’m OK with the timing of it, during and before a game like that. And doing it on June 5 here meant it was going to be miserable in the stands.

But it was certainly big and gaudy and unlike anything we have seen in UAE football.