However, one player on the team, the South African Benji Haswell, wouldn’t let go what they started in the Irish Pub. Haswell’s home survived the flooding, and he took in another player, Dave Ashton, whose home and family were partially destroyed.

And, being in the Internet age as well as the time when a pub TV screen could bring together men from all walks of life, Haswell used email to contact the guys he hoped, but could not be sure, were all alive in other parts of the country, or even overseas.

His message was simple: “Let’s keep going here,” he wrote.

One by one, the men and their families returned. First they had to help the owners rebuild Finn McCool’s drinking house. Soon the team members — now four, now seven, finally 11 players — were reunited. And they won the same league title that the second generation of the team has just recaptured in the adult soccer league.

Frank Komduur, the Dutchman on the team, said that Finn McCool’s, and the bond between the men, was 50 percent of the reason to come back. Paul Daley, an Englishman, found the right words to describe their bond. “The other teams looked on us as a ragtag bunch they could laugh at,” he said. “But we beat them. We’re a disparate lot, but we showed we had cohesion.”

Cohesion, and compulsion. Rea, the author among the bunch and the wanderer, is now resettled in New Orleans with his wife and their 8-year-old, soccer-playing daughter. The child, and the parents of her friends, are urging him to be their coach, and he might one day hang up his shoes and put himself through the tutorials to be that coach.

He is, after all, a Chelsea fan, familiar with the way that José Mourinho gets the best out of a roster of players of varied nationalities in London. But Rea has unfinished business on three fields. He is writing a book, fiction this time, not bound by all the fact-checking and the attention to detail that Katrina forced upon him for the first book.

He is the caregiver for his daughter, Nicola, while his wife is at the office.

Last, but very far from least, he remains a player. The next game, on Aug. 29, is Finn McCool’s lineup from 2005 against Finn McCool’s of 2015.