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United States goalkeeper Tim Howard, a North Brunswick native, is one of the many New Jersey soccer stars Frank Giase covered during his 19 years at The Star-Ledger.

(GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO/ EPA)

This will not be an easy column to write. How do you say goodbye to a job that, since I was a kid, I always thought was the greatest in the world?

The Star-Ledger and I will be parting ways next week after 19 years. The circumstances are not important. What is important, and what I will carry with me for the rest of my life, are the memories of friends and colleagues and the bonding that was shared through many difficult nights as we put together the greatest newspaper in New Jersey and one of the best in the country.

When I arrived at The Star-Ledger in 1995 the United States has just hosted the most successful World Cup in history the year before. Sitting at the Rose Bowl, covering the final between Italy and Brazil for The Woodbridge News Tribune, watching Italy in its traditional blue shirt and white shorts and Brazil in its legendary yellow shirt and blue shorts battle in front of 100,000 fans, the moment could not have been more perfect.

And knowing that my father, who had passed away the year before, had sat with my brother in the same stadium seven years earlier to watch the the Giants beat the Broncos in the Super Bowl, made the memory even more special.

When the News Tribune and Home News merged in October 1995, I made the jump to The Star-Ledger, where I was able to work alongside Ike Kuhns, a writer I’d read for many years for his coverage of the Cosmos and Jets. Ike and I had traveled together and covered numerous events over the years, and he was a mentor to me in my early years in the business.

At that time, there was great anticipation of what Major League Soccer could become, and an even greater prospect of how it would change the sports landscape across the country.

But the league didn’t start off well.

Doug Logan, the original commissioner who was replaced in 1999, was not the visionary Don Garber has proven to be. Aside from two of the original owner-operators, Philip Anschutz and Lamar Hunt, Garber is the single-most important reason for the success MLS has become, guiding the struggling league through its most difficult time and turning it into an entity with unlimited potential.

From the day we sat in New York as the league announced the name of each team, we knew MLS would be something special. No more teams named after animals! MLS carved its niche from the very beginning.

The league has grown from the original 10 teams to 19, with New York City FC and Orlando City SC arriving next year and Atlanta and Miami on the horizon. It is a league that has surpassed the NHL in average attendance and television ratings and has a higher average attendance than the NBA, yet it is still not given the respect it deserves from the mainstream media despite being entrenched as the fourth major sport in this country.

It took a few years but Hunt became the first to build his own stadium. That opened the flood gates for owners to do the same, and the league now has the majority of its teams in their own buildings, controlling their finances and not having their game dates affected by conflicts with teams with whom they share the facility.

But the players make the game, and New Jersey has a proud tradition of talented ones. From Peter Vermes to Tony Meola to John Harkes to Claudio Reyna to Tab Ramos to Tim Howard, there has been an unlimited pipeline of talent in the Garden State. Covering those players from high school, to college, to the pros to the U.S. national team to the Hall of Fame has provided me with some of the greatest moments of my career. And now that many of them are retired, I’m proud to call them colleagues and friends.

And let’s not forget Michael Bradley, a Jersey guy who became a MetroStar at 16 and is following that path to greatness. Or Alexi Lalas, who from his first game as a freshman at Rutgers in 1988 it was evident he would become a national team player and have a Hall of Fame career as well.

During those times, college soccer was king, and the battles between Bob Reasso’s Rutgers Scarlet Knights and Bob Bradley’s Princeton Tigers and Manny Schellscheidt’s Seton Hall Pirates were always fun. And when Bruce Arena came to town with Virginia teams that included Meola, Harkes, Reyna and Jeff Agoos, or Sigi Schmid brought in his UCLA squad, which was stocked with future national team players like Brad Friedel, Chris Henderson, Cobi Jones, Joe-Max Moore and Mike Lapper, it was evident with that talent that soccer would at some point take off.

And it did. Not just MLS, but the national team as well. This generation of fans are blessed with a competitive national team that consistently qualifies for the World Cup. But their parents remember how home qualifiers were played in front of crowds rooting for the opposition and how Paul Caligiuri’s goal against Trinidad and Tobago on Nov. 19, 1989 enabled the United States to qualify for the 1990 World Cup and changed the future of soccer in this country.

I would be remiss not to mention the women’s game. Between increasing obligations on the copy desk and my time with MLS and U.S. internationals, the women’s game didn’t always get the coverage it deserved. But with a New Jersey talent base that included Christie Rampone, Heather O’Reilly, Carli Lloyd, Tobin Heath and Saskia Webber over the years, the National Women’s Soccer League is here to stay and the women’s national team will always be a world power.

It has been my privilege to have been your soccer voice at The Star-Ledger for the past two decades. As I say goodbye to the newspaper, it is not a parting for the many readers and soccer fans throughout the country. And as long as there’s an internet, I’ll never be too far away.

Frank Giase: fgiase@gmail.com