Once the celebration in the away end had reached its conclusion, Carl, the Co-President of NMU supporter’s group The Curse, and company piled back into their bus and began the 10-hour drive home to Albuquerque with the comforting feeling that this wasn’t the end of the club’s magical Open Cup journey.

However, it was on that ride through the plains of Texas that Carl took notice of the challenge now facing him and his club: a trip to Minnesota United FC. With the Quarterfinal draw already predetermined and excitement at an all-time high, questions from fellow fans began flooding his social media mentions.

Are we going to get a bus? What’s the plan?

“I looked at the 20-hour bus ride from Albuquerque to Saint Paul and for the most part I would say that’s probably not feasible for most people. You’d have to take a lot of time off work, it’s very difficult,” said Carl. “I half-heartedly looked at flights thinking this would be great, but I’m sure it’s going to be really expensive. Round-trip tickets were like $500-600.”

While Carl was trying to figure things out from the road, First Financial Credit Union Vice President Clint Gray was back in Albuquerque assessing travel options with fellow New Mexico United fans across social media.

“I was on Facebook and I saw everyone trying to figure out tickets,” said Gray. “Someone posted that over 1,000 people were looking at [plane] tickets from Albuquerque to Minnesota through one of the websites and everyone kept saying it’s too expensive.

“The next day I went to our CEO and was like there’s a great opportunity here where we can help fans get to Minnesota and kind of told him what had happened – that we won – because he’s not a big soccer fan, so I kind of just told him a little bit of backstory…and he was like ‘Sure, go ahead. Let’s see what we can do.’ So, then I called [Vice President of Ticket Sales and Partnerships] Ron Patel at New Mexico United and told him we want to help sponsor people to get there.”

Carl, Gray, Patel and other members of the NMU front office held meetings on the Thursday and Friday following Wednesday night’s win over FC Dallas, discussing any option under the sun that seemed to make sense.

“The original thought was if we donate money, can we get some people there?” said Gray. “And then by Friday it turned into, let’s see if we can’t just get a full plane and First Financial Credit Union will subsidize a portion of it and everybody else just pays a lower amount.”