On Sunday, May 12th, 1996 the NY/NJ MetroStars played D.C. United for this first time, kicking off one of the best rivalries in Major League Soccer. The Metros downed D.C. in a shootout, thanks to goals from Nicola Caricola and Ruben Dario Hernandez, on top of a second half goal from Giovanni Savarese.

As the Red Bulls prepare to take on D.C. United for the 66th time in the regular season play on Sunday, we wanted to take a look back at the world when this rivalry was born.

Let's take a trip down memory lane.

Tha Crossroads from Bone Thugs-n-Harmony topped the Billboard charts, and stayed there for eight weeks. You'd have to assume it was blaring in the Metros locker room at RFK after that shootout win.

Twister had just blown into theatres, and topped the box office taking in over $40,000,00 on it's opening weekend.

NBC ruled Television, with four of the five top-rated shows in spring of 96. #MustSeeTV

ER - 21,098,000 average viewers Seinfeld - 20,330,800 average viewers Friends - 17,933,300 average viewers Caroline in the City - 17,262,000 average viewers Monday Night Football - 16,398,000 average viewers

Aside form the excitement of Major League Soccer's first season, the 1996 presidential election campaign was heating up. During the week of May 12th, incumbent Bill Clinton held a 20 point lead over challenger Bob Dole, and went on to to win in November.

1996 was also a banner year for technology and electronics.

"Stanford CSD PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on a Digital Library project, and needed a large amount of diskspace to test their Pagerank algorithm. At the time, the 4 GigaByte hard disks were the largest available, so they assembeled 10 of these drives into a low-cost cabinet, and Google was born."

The first Palm Pilot was released, and originally sold for $129. (Not pictured: Stylus)

Price per gallon:

At the pump, a gallon of gas cost $1.29 (national average), and at the gorecey store, a gallon of milk was $2.53 (national average).

Jesse Marsch looked like this:

Anatole Abang wasn't even born:

Although may things have changed since May 12th, 1996, one thing has stayed the same - the rivalry between these two clubs is as intense as it was back when we were listening to Bone Thugs, watching Seinfeld, voting for Bill Clinton, and setting appointments in our Palm Pilots.

See you Sunday.