Sometime Tuesday night, someone reached up and pulled down a banner that had hung at Maggie McGarry's Irish Pub on North Beach's Broadway corridor for the better part of two decades — the red-and-white colors of Arsenal FC, the calling card of the San Francisco branch of Arsenal America, a supporters group that has been gathering at the pub since before most of the Premier League's current roster was old enough to shave.

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.