Back in April, the Minnesota Senate voted in loud fashion to ban any state money from being spent on any pro soccer stadium.

On a 61-4 vote, the Senate said Minnesota was forbidden to use tax dollars to “fund the construction of a new major league soccer stadium.”

The House thought that was a pretty good idea and adopted the exact same provision.

What we learned in school is that when the House and Senate both agree to something, and there are no loud objections — even the Minnesota soccer team’s lobbyist didn’t create a fuss — it’ll become law, right?

Uh, no.

Despite that overwhelming bipartisan support, the provision curtailing any soccer spending never became law. It is nowhere in the final bill.

In the last-minute crush of legislation in May, the soccer-funding ban was dropped with little public discussion from the bill the House and Senate presented to the governor. The provision’s death was so quiet that even those whose job include tracking legislation assumed it had passed.

But it didn’t.

“Stadium policy is the undead of legislative issues,” Sen. Branden Petersen, R-Andover, who sponsored the Senate’s soccer-funding ban amendment.

He said he was disappointed the amendment that had so much support simply disappeared. But, he added, it had to be intentional.

“Somebody talked to somebody,” he said.

Although the soccer provision originally was a Senate idea, Rep. Sarah Anderson, R-Plymouth, said that Senate opposition doomed the provision.

The lack of a legal ban on tax expenditures to help build a stadium does not mean that lawmakers changed their minds about spending cash on yet another sports venue and that suddenly taxpayer cash will flow to Minnesota United’s bid to build a home in Minnesota.

Lawmakers, particularly in the Senate, are on the record as opposing such spending. Republican leaders in the Minnesota House are unlikely to lead the charge to change minds on big stadium spending. And Gov. Mark Dayton said that the state of Minnesota is suffering from “stadium fatigue.”

In other words, even without a legal ban there was not much state spending in anyone’s immediate plans, officials have said.

But there could be local spending. After Minneapolis rebuffed the soccer team owners’ request to build a downtown stadium with about $150 million if they got tax breaks, St. Paul began wooing the team. St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman said last week that the city needs to “move expeditiously to get a project built on the Snelling and University site.

“Minnesota deserves a Major League Soccer franchise, and I’m prepared to work to make that happen for Minnesota and St. Paul,” Coleman said.

He did not say exactly what the city would offer to “make that happen” and whether he thought any state aid would be needed.

Even the original provision, had it become law, probably would not have put much of crimp in plans.

In discussing the proposed ban, Joel Carlson, one of four lobbyists the Minnesota United Football Club registered in April, said the team mostly did not mind it.

“They intend to privately own and construct a major-league soccer facility … without the help of any public funds,” Carlson told committee members this spring.

And had lawmakers passed it, which they didn’t, and it had become law, which it didn’t, they still could have suddenly gotten an urge to spend state money on a soccer stadium. What the Legislature passes, the Legislature can repeal.

Rachel E. Stassen-Berger’s column appears Wednesdays in the Pioneer Press. She can be reached at rstassen-berger@pioneerpress.com or on Twitter @rachelsb.