They had 48 hours to prepare, McLaurin reminded the team at the end of practice, “Don’t eat hotpot,” Cherokee said.

On game day, McLaurin wore his old Michigan helmet, which he’d covered with Dockers-orange masking tape. Fitz was psyching himself up for his first game since high school. He’d had two steaks for breakfast. “I’m ready to just smash into people until I injure myself,” he said, grinning. Weezy took off his orange socks with a marijuana leaf design and put on regular orange socks.

The difference in the team was palpable from the whistle. At one point, Rock blew past two defenders, charged into two more, then dragged them along behind him, and flopped down just over the ten-yard marker. On a few downs, McLaurin just plowed through like a bowling ball.

Then the errors began: Kang fumbled the ball after a handoff (“extremely tragic,” said the announcer), Alien dropped a pass, and Rock, who hadn’t slept the previous night because he’d been on duty, ran the wrong way on a play, which led to a turnover. “Rock, you don’t know what you’re doing, get off the field,” McLaurin yelled. Later, as Chongqing was about to snap the ball, a whistle blew. The players looked around, confused. An old man had wandered onto the field for a better view.

At halftime, the Mustangs were up by a touchdown. “I know you have family and friends here,” said Marcus, one of the coaches. “We don’t wanna go home empty-handed. This is your house.” Weezy summarized: “Don’t play like a pussy.”

Chengdu scored again in the third quarter, putting them up 12-0. If things were already wrong, they started to go wronger. During one play, Fitz jammed his finger. He jogged off the field, held still while someone tied on a splint, and jogged back on. Tina sighed in admiration. “In America, when this happens, is it normal to go back in?” she asked. Fat Baby, playing defensive tackle, got in a fight—the most notable thing he did on-field all season. Rock got crunched and couldn’t move his head. A couple of teammates grabbed his limbs and carried him off the field. “That is not how you move someone with a neck injury,” McLaurin said under his breath.

It’s hard to say what happened in the fourth quarter. Maybe the Dockers finally realized they were about to be humiliated by Chengdu on their home turf. Maybe Chengdu started getting tired. Maybe Chongqing started getting lucky. But with about ten minutes left, McLaurin launched a bomb into the deep right corner. Somehow, Fitz was there, open. The ball fell right into his busted hands and he booked it into the end zone. “He got hurt and still got a touchdown?” Tina said. “He is perfect.”

As the game wound down, McLaurin came off the field clutching his stomach, knelt down on the sideline, and, as was becoming tradition, vomited. Minutes later he was back in and Chongqing was pushing toward the end zone until there were three yards to go and less than a minute left. Eric subbed in at running back, and McLaurin handed him the ball, which he muscled through the hole Tong Er had created and over the line.

The Chongqing side erupted. The Dockers now led, 14-12, with less than a minute on the clock. Seven subbed in as quarterback for the final play. “Hut, hike!” he said for the first time in a long time. The next moment, he got leveled, and came up limping. Seven’s season was over. And within seconds, the game was, too.

The teams lined up and shook hands, and the Dockers took turns posing with the Sichuan Bowl. Heads were cradled, butts were slapped. “This game changed my life,” Kang said in his first-ever post-win interview. “It made me more confident. Now I know that, in life, if I have some trouble, I should just push on and I can still make it better.”

More than any other sport, the players told me, football takes teamwork. Sure, soccer and basketball require cooperation, but those sports favor stars. “Argentina has Maradona, he’s the most lihai,” the most badass, said Fat Baby. “If they didn’t have him, they’d only have an OK team. ... Football isn’t like that; you can’t depend on one person.”

Historians and sociologists have long theorized about why football overtook baseball post–World War II as the most popular sport in the United States. Among the many explanations is that it emphasized cooperation and teamwork at a time when social ties were weakening. Now, China is navigating its own “bowling alone” moment, with an erosion of faith in public institutions and a sense that self-interest has replaced communitarian spirit. Not that the solidarity championed by the communist revolution was by any means ideal. But some Chinese remember that time with nostalgia, compared with the market-worshipping, corruption-tainted era that emerged post-1979, even if they enjoy the spoils of the latter. A whole genre of national news story has emerged about passersby ignoring strangers in need, which only feeds the sense that China has lost its collective soul. At the same time that youngsters want to declare independence from the crowd, they also have a craving for communion. If anything, one intensifies the other.

And to hear the Dockers tell it, nothing strengthens social bonds better than football. In addition to practices and games, they’d started holding team dinners, movie nights, hiking trips, and swimming outings. “I think of them as my big brothers,” said Fengfeng, who like most of the players, and most Chinese under the age of 35, is an only child.

The rest of the season flew by. Off the field, the players—to use Fengfeng’s words—kept running. Marco’s Korean restaurant opened. Figo and his wife moved out of his parents’ place, with their financial help of course. Kang, Alien, and Weezy all got into academic programs abroad and planned to enroll in the spring. Fat Baby got a new SWAT-team doll.

And, at long last, they were actually playing football. In November, the Dockers traveled to Hong Kong to play the Warhawks and creamed them, 32-0. In December, they defeated their nemesis, Chengdu, in a game even McLaurin was proud of. They won not because of any spectacular runs or Hail Marys. They were simply finding the holes, getting the sacks, completing the handoffs, playing as a team. That win sealed it for the Dockers: They were going to the championship.

If you wanted to create a movie version of an evil Chinese football team, you couldn’t do much better than the Shanghai Warriors. They were big, they were foreign (almost half were non-Chinese), and that season they’d devoured their opponents one by one. So I was surprised when, one day over all-you-can-eat sushi, McLaurin said, “We’ll win.” Not I think we have a chance: “We’ll win.”

The Dockers cranked through into the new year, dialing the frequency of practices up to three times a week. This time, no one objected. McLaurin screened videos of Shanghai’s games for the team, pointing out the Warriors’ weaknesses.

When the team arrived in Shanghai, they dropped their bags at a cheap hotel, where escort services slipped business cards under the doors, and gathered at a sports bar downtown. Eric gave a short motivational speech, which Soso followed with her own dirty version of a Chinese children’s song: “Drop, drop, drop the soap / Everyone go quickly tackle him / Go fuck him in the ass.” In the cab back to the hotel, I asked Coach Marcus what he thought the championship game would be like. “Beautiful,” he said. “It has to be. Anytime something happens for the first time, it’s beautiful.”

On championship day, the stands of Shanghai’s Luwan stadium were empty—not because no one showed, but because the officials in charge of the venue were demanding an extra 11,000 yuan to open the bleachers. “Feel free to shit on the sidelines,” said Frank Schipani, a New Yorker who coached the Warriors. Spectators stood along the fence instead.

Chongqing started strong: an interception on its first defensive possession, followed by a quick touchdown. Patrick, the American quarterback who’d been out drinking till late the night before, found McLaurin in the deep right corner of the end zone. The two-point conversion made it 8-0, Chongqing.

Shanghai answered with a long touchdown of its own, and it quickly became clear how evenly matched the two teams were. This was the most brutal, physical game I’d seen in China. The hits looked like they hurt; there were fights, even an ejection. Chong-qing was able to pick up yards on the ground, thanks in no small part to Tong Er’s formidable blocking. Shanghai was disciplined, with a speedy quarterback, who helped them amass an eight-point fourth-quarter lead.

But with only minutes left, Chongqing surged. First, a pass from Patrick nearly fell short but still found its receiver, who booked it into the end zone. “We make plays, we win this game now,” McLaurin said, the score tied. A minute later, Fitz nabbed the ball after it bounced off a Shanghai receiver’s hands, for the turnover. “That’s why I love you, baby!” Fengfeng yelled as he jumped on Fitz. A few plays later, another bomb delivered to the far corner clinched the game: Chongqing 24, Shanghai 16.

The post-championship celebration was like a million before it, but also completely different. A local TV station interviewed McLaurin, who could barely move his arm after a hard hit had popped his shoulder out of its socket. A little boy asked for his autograph. The Dockers sang, “We Are the Champions.”

I found Marco changing back into his sweats, quietly satisfied. “My baby’s grown up,” he said, recalling their earliest practices. Weezy outsourced his post-game comments to Drake. “ ‘We started from the bottom, now we here,’ right?” he said. “ ‘Started from the bottom, now my whole team fucking here.’ ” On the way to the airport, the Dockers joked about who would play who in the inevitable movie about their triumph. Fat Baby picked Daniel Wu, the Hong Kong actor. Marco? Kung-fu star Ashton Chen. What about Fat Baby’s wife, Yangyang? “Sandra Bullock,” Fat Baby said.

Soso said the team’s story reminded her of the movie Alexander, in which Alexander the Great and his men were determined to “go east” at all costs: “ ‘What is ahead, I know not,’ ” she said, paraphrasing a speech from the movie. “ ‘I just want to go east. If some men want to return home, they may return home. The rest of us will continue east. ... We can’t give our true hearts to everyone, but to give them to our compatriots is enough.’ ... I don’t remember exactly, but it basically went like that.”

This, it seemed, was the real appeal of American football to the Dockers. Figo would go back to his job at the local government office, and Soso would go back to working long hours at her design firm. Fat Baby would go back to not going into work. But now, whenever they watched Any Given Sunday or Remember the Titans or Rudy, these stories weren’t just stories anymore.

The celebration continued in Chongqing the following week, but McLaurin had trouble enjoying it. He needed surgery on his shoulder, and his current job didn’t provide health insurance. He was also applying for new jobs, in China and the United States, as well as law schools. Chongqing was fun, he said, but it was starting to feel small.

The Dockers were having their own issues. Two weeks after the championship, they met at a teahouse. Marco and others criticized Soso for not doing enough to recruit new players. If they weren’t happy, she said, they could start a new team. Fat Baby almost stormed out of the room. “Chinese people don’t know how to come together,” he told me. “It’s deep in their bones.”

Starting a Chinese football team might have been the easy part. From the beginning, it was never a question of if McLaurin would leave Chongqing, but when. “No one else can lead the team,” said Fat Baby, and he included himself. That’s the way things tend to go in China: It’s simple to get a project off the ground. It’s hard to build something lasting.

After the final game, Figo posted a note on WeChat. It was a photo of McLaurin in full Dockers regalia, face all serious. Figo had added a caption: “The person in this picture, Christopher J. McLaurin, joined us in September 2012, became our head coach, and made us understand what real football is. From the beginning, he told me countless times, ‘I want to make you the strongest football team in China!’ Every time, I said, ‘Yeaaaaahhh!’ But in my heart, I had doubts. ... Then in 2013, he said, ‘I want to start a Chinese football league and play a tournament with the whole country!’ Again I thought, ‘That’s too hard, so many cities, they’re all amateur teams. There are rules, travel fees, so many other problems!’ But he did it. He did everything. He organized the league and led us to become the national champions! This guy, who’s six years younger than me, taught me: If you have a dream, you should protect it, work hard, and persevere to accomplish it.” Fengfeng left the first comment: “I love him.”

Christopher Beam is a staff writer at The New Republic.