The drive to Portland is long and dark for Mitchell Ketchen. It takes about an hour, all in, cutting through winding roads and sharp corners. His house is 20 minutes from the nearest shopping center, relatively cut off from the world. He lives in a place where generation after generation have stayed, a town built on basketball, football and baseball.

There isn’t much soccer to be found.

But get behind the wheel, and within 60 minutes, he approaches what has become a mecca of American soccer. And it isn’t even a field. Fitzpatrick Stadium is a public turf, used primarily for Portland High School. You’ve seen it thousands of times - American football goalposts at either end, a track around the edge, bleachers on either side. It could be transplanted in pretty much any town in the U.S.

And in Portland, Maine, it is the hub of a movement, a 6,000-seat fortress of sorts that has housed numerous attendance records in USL League One. This is the home of Portland Hearts of Pine, the trendy hipster brand that turned out to be rather good at this sport.

But more importantly, it is a club that embraced a community - and which rallied around them in return. Hearts of Pine are cool. But they’re also a model of what USL League One football can - and perhaps should - be, a team that not only understands the people it caters to, but also achieves success in the process.

“We've built this beacon of what grassroots football can look like in the States,” Club Founder Gabe Hoffman-Johnson said. “These are all the things we set out to do.”