The two lads saw the microphone and wandered over.
They moved slowly, physically tired from their journey, but with their faces lit up by what was happening around them. They were trying to take it all in.
We were in a side street outside a bar which, rumour had it, was about to open specifically for Aston Villa supporters. I was with BBC Midlands colleagues and asking fans to sum up their feelings at being in Paris, hours before a Champions League quarter-final.
It emerged that, like quite a few we had met already, they had travelled without tickets and with no serious hope of getting any. Unlike most of the others, they said it was their first European trip, but they had heard the stories from friends and those who sit around them at home games and decided this time they would go.
After a succession of long coach rides, they had arrived.
Why, I asked, had they gone to all that trouble – and expense – for a game that they knew they would not be able to see, and could have watched at home or in the pub?
“I don’t know. We just had to be here, didn’t we?” said one.
“Yes,” his friend replied. “It’s the Villa, you know?”
And I did know.
Covering Villa’s return to Europe over the past two seasons, I have spoken to dozens of fans who might have said the same. Many of them had travelled knowing they were unlikely to get into the stadium.
But it demonstrated that, for so many supporters, supporting a football club is about much more than 90 minutes, twice a week.
Some of those following the team around Europe were from Birmingham, many from the wider Villa-supporting diaspora. They came from all classes and levels of society – some able to travel in style, others content to get there by any means available. They saw the sights and sampled the local food and drink.
But what seemed to make it matter most – why those two lads felt they just had to be there – did not seem to be the city, the match, the quality of the opposition, or even the status of the competition. It was the sense of belonging to something, of being together.
