By Gus "Walk-Off" Fields
There's no train station in Elversberg. If you want to get there, you drive. That small, stubborn fact tells you most of what you need to know about the club now preparing to play in the Bundesliga — Germany's glamour league, home to Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund — despite representing a town smaller than a decent-sized American high school district.
According to BBC Sport, SV Elversberg's rise from the regional leagues to the top of German football has been meteoric. This is a club built for a town of 13,000 people, now lining up against institutions with stadiums that hold more fans than Elversberg has residents.
The finer details of how they got here — the seasons climbed, the money problems solved on a shoestring — aren't fully spelled out in the reporting available to us, and this desk won't pretend to know more than it does. What is clear is the shape of the story: a place with no train station taking on the wealthiest, best-drilled clubs in the country.
German football has a soft spot for this kind of tale. The Bundesliga's members-ownership tradition keeps clubs tethered to their communities rather than billionaires, which is part of why a town like Elversberg can dream at all. Whether that dream survives first contact with a club like Bayern is a question only the season itself can answer.
For now, take it for what it is: a tiny town and a football team that has no business being where it is — except that it earned every inch of it, game by game, all the way up from the regional leagues to the biggest stage in German football.
Final score's the last thing that mattered here.
— Compiled from reporting by BBC Sport.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."