The group is in its twentieth year, which, in the lifecycle of a soccer supporters club, is a real number — long enough to have watched entire generations of players come up, peak, and retire while nursing pints at the same barstools. The banner wasn't a piece of merchandise. It was more like a plaque, the kind of thing that tells you a regular crowd has been here long enough to leave a mark on the walls.

Maggie McGarry's has served as the anchor for the group through all of it: the Europa League runs, the title-less stretches, the Wenger years and whatever came after. The bar sits on Broadway near Kearny, tucked into a strip that mixes tourist-adjacent clubs with spots that have genuine neighborhoods roots, and it has drawn this particular crowd back, match after match, often for early-morning kickoffs that require a commitment most casual fans aren't willing to make.

The supporters posted a plea online asking for the banner's return, no questions asked. As of this writing, it hasn't come back.

Walking past McGarry's tomorrow, you wouldn't necessarily notice the gap — the exterior doesn't give away what's missing inside. But the wall where the banner hung is bare, and a group that's spent twenty years treating a particular corner of a North Beach pub as their place is, for the moment, missing the one object that made that claim visible.