I had imagined Greenville becoming familiar much more quickly than it actually did.

Charlotte had done that almost immediately, perhaps because every return journey there began to feel like slipping into an old jacket, while Knoxville had earned its place through repetition, through conversations that resumed where they had left off months earlier and through supporters who started greeting me by name before I remembered theirs. Greenville resisted that kind of easy affection. It was undeniably beautiful, cleaner than most Southern cities its size, walkable in a way so much of America stubbornly refuses to be, full of brick buildings that had discovered second lives as cafés, galleries and breweries, yet I always found myself looking around with the quiet awareness that I was still a visitor. Sometimes a city welcomes you immediately. Sometimes it waits to see whether you’ll come back.

My son, Noah, and my wife had joined me on the road to spend the weekend with me, which gave me the excuse to experience Greenville like someone with nowhere particular to be. We wandered through Falls Park on the Reedy while children chased one another across the suspension bridge and couples sat with takeaway coffees watching the river disappear beneath the old mill buildings, and later we found ourselves laughing through an unnecessarily competitive round of miniature golf at McPherson Park that nobody seemed especially interested in winning. It struck me that Greenville encouraged wandering more than driving, something still rare in much of the South, and for a few hours football disappeared entirely beneath conversations about work, family and whether Noah had inherited my inability to read a map.

Lunch arrived at Brick Street Café after a recommendation from two separate people within the space of half an hour, which in my experience usually meant it was either exceptional or hopelessly overrated. The waitress insisted I try their chicken salad with pimento cheese and Duke’s mayonnaise, explaining the importance of that final ingredient with the seriousness normally reserved for constitutional amendments, and when I admitted that I’d somehow managed to travel through the South without really understanding why people spoke about Duke’s with near-religious devotion, she looked at me with genuine pity before disappearing towards the kitchen. She wasn’t wrong. There are certain flavours that somehow belong entirely to one part of the world, and eating that sandwich while looking out onto downtown Greenville felt as rooted in South Carolina as maple syrup would have felt in Vermont. I wrote the name down in my notebook before I’d even finished lunch.

The city itself felt wealthier than Knoxville without ever becoming unfriendly. Boutique shops stood beside restored warehouses, office workers drifted between coffee shops carrying laptops rather than lunchboxes, and almost every conversation seemed to include somebody talking about growth, investment or another new building that would soon appear a few streets away. Knoxville had always struck me as comfortable with its own pace, while Greenville seemed quietly impatient, forever convinced that something even better was about to happen just around the corner. Neither was superior. They were simply different ways of imagining the future.

The drive from Knoxville to Greenville had become strangely familiar to me despite never actually making it with the supporters travelling that afternoon. I recognised exits where I’d once stopped for fuel, remembered a roadside barbecue shack where smoke had drifted across the interstate months earlier, and found myself wondering whether dozens of Knoxville fans were pulling into exactly the same coffee shops and scenic overlooks I’d photographed on earlier journeys. Football supporters, I realised, collect roads as much as they collect stadiums. Their rituals begin long before kick-off, somewhere between filling the tank and ordering another paper cup of coffee that tastes far better than it has any right to.

By the time I reached the stadium I noticed something had changed in me before anything had changed on the pitch. I spent the first ten minutes scanning the touchline looking for Tomás Villalba before I’d properly looked at either starting line-up. The thought embarrassed me slightly. Journalists are supposed to follow clubs, leagues and stories, not managers whose careers can change with one difficult month, yet there I was searching for one man in a navy suit while twenty-two players completed their warm-up around him. When I finally found him he looked somehow older than the last time I’d seen him, though perhaps professionalism has a habit of ageing people before its time. He greeted Greenville staff with the ease of somebody already belonging, then crossed the technical area to shake every hand in the Knoxville dugout before embracing members of his old backroom team one by one.

The applause surprised me less than its warmth. Knoxville supporters rose almost instinctively as he walked towards the opposite bench, not with the sentimental adoration reserved for returning heroes but with something quieter and perhaps healthier than that. They seemed to understand that he had not abandoned them so much as continued the journey they had always known he wanted to make. Around me Greenville supporters spoke confidently about comfortable victories and promotion pushes, while Knoxville fans answered with the peculiar optimism that only football seems capable of sustaining, insisting that the squad Villalba had built could still trouble anybody on the right afternoon. Nobody sounded bitter. Mostly they sounded curious.

The stadium itself reflected the city surrounding it. Food arrived from licensed vendors rather than homemade smokers balanced on the back of pickup trucks, organised fan zones replaced the wonderfully chaotic mingling I’d grown used to in Knoxville, and the media facilities looked closer to something I’d expect from a second-division baseball franchise than a third-tier football club. Everything worked exactly as intended. Everything felt polished. Yet somewhere between collecting my accreditation and finding my seat I realised I missed the smell of barbecue drifting across gravel car parks and volunteers recognising supporters before they’d even reached the turnstiles. Progress, like football itself, always asks you to leave something behind.

The match unfolded at a quicker rhythm than I remembered from previous meetings between these clubs, Greenville eventually winning three goals to one, although I found myself paying less attention to the score than to the subtle differences between Villalba’s new team and the old one he had left behind. The shirts were different, the colours had changed and the quality appeared higher, but there were moments when players moved almost simultaneously towards the same loose ball or pressed together with a confidence that looked oddly familiar even to somebody still learning the sport. Perhaps managers leave traces of themselves behind wherever they work. Perhaps clubs remember ideas longer than the people who introduced them.

Darkness had settled by the time I left Greenville, and somewhere beyond the city lights the interstate stretched north towards Charlotte while another road disappeared west towards Tennessee. I sat for a few minutes before starting the engine, watching office windows reflect the last orange light of the evening, and found myself wondering whether Greenville might become the place I returned to over and over again during the coming year. Then another thought followed almost immediately. Maybe I wasn’t choosing cities anymore. Maybe, without quite noticing when it had happened, I was beginning to follow the people who passed through them.