MONTREAL - Montreal Impact midfielder Sandro Grande is dreaming big.
''I don't know if there's ever been a sporting event like this at Olympic Stadium,'' Grande said of the 55,571 who took in the Impact's 2-0 win Wednesday over Santos Laguna in the opening leg of the CONCACAF Champions League quarter-final. ''Everyone says this is a hockey nation, but this is a soccer nation.''
That remains a big exaggeration, but the significance of Wednesday's crowd to watch a club soccer game is not lost on the Canadian Soccer Association.
General secretary Peter Montopoli says he watched in amazement as the stands at Olympic Stadium continued to fill up long after the game had begun, and even after Eduardo Sebrango scored his first of two goals in the fifth minute.
He said the feelings were similar to the ones he felt in 2007 when Canada hosted the FIFA U-20 World Cup and set tournament records for attendance. The main difference was that Wednesday was not a contest between national teams, but rather two club teams playing in supposedly marginal leagues.
''There's something going on in this country in terms of a love affair with this sport,'' Montopoli said. ''We've built the base and now it's moving its way up. An event like this shows that not only are people who play soccer passionate about the sport, but their families are as well.''
Indeed, the crowd at Olympic Stadium for this game was strewn not only with families, but just about every type of person you can imagine.
There were the die-hard soccer fans waving flags and chanting throughout the game, while others were attending their first professional soccer match and didn't quite know how to react.
The party atmosphere in the stadium was truly set off when the final whistle in the Impact victory, as plumes of blue smoke released from canisters rose to the air from the rowdiest pocket of the crowd while the rest jumped and screamed in celebration.
''I've never seen anything like this,'' said Montreal native Sebastien Michaud, 19. ''But I'll definitely be going to see the Impact this summer. I'm sold.''
The crowd wasn't exclusively local, as Martin Saucier of Shawinigan, Que., drove two hours after work to get to Olympic Stadium in time for the 8 p.m. opening kick.
''I'm a big soccer fan,'' Saucier explained. ''Yes, we exist in Quebec.''
And they came out in droves Wednesday, but Montopoli said there's work left to be done for the Canadian soccer fan base to grow from one-off events like the FIFA U-20 World Cup and the CONCACAF Champions League. He said the national team program will first have to become more competitive on the international stage, and then Canadian soccer will need to become a viable television product to see lasting growth.
''Then we'll be the entity we one day want to be,'' he said. ''But there were 55,000 people in the building tonight who believed soccer is relevant in Canada.''
Getting back to Grande's claim that Canada is already a soccer nation, his coach John Limniatis wouldn't go quite that far.
But he still saw Wednesday's landmark support as an important jumping off point for the sport to build off.
''We would like it to be a soccer nation, and we're working hard to get there,'' he said. ''Hockey has a tremendous history that we don't have yet, but we hope to get there one day. Tonight was a great step towards that.''