Look for her at the next TFC home game.
She is five-foot-seven, a redhead and she will get up from her seat the moment the game ends. Instead of watching her son the goalkeeper, she will pace the concourse and only return at halftime.
"Where's Mom?" Steve Stamatopoulos asked his Dad the other day at BMO Field.
"Couldn't watch," said her husband Nick.
A stone's throw away, Kenny Stamatopoulos stood a few feet away from the Toronto goal, all by himself.
The story of how Kenny Stamatopoulos ended up standing there actually goes back to the late 1960s with a girl from Cyprus named Christina. She is 14, going to English classes and there is an older boy at the same East York bus stop. His name is Nick Stamatopoulos and they will marry in 1974.
The pair go back to Nick's home country of Greece where he tries his luck as a painter. They have a son, Kenny, to go with Steve, born in Canada.
The Stamatopoulos family returns to Canada. Nick works construction and the family settles in Markham.
"I stopped playing hockey when I was 12 years old," said Stamatopoulos. I played basketball and studied Karate but there wasn't anything that got me going until I started kicking the soccer ball around in the backyard with my Dad."
Stamatopoulos started moving through the local ranks. At 16, he figured he could catch on somewhere in Europe but his mother said no.
"He was too young and he hadn't finished his high school. As it was, it was really, really hard when he was gone."
The next year, there was no holding him back. And so he began his parent's journey, only in reverse, back to Greece, and alone.
"Being by myself, that was the hard part when your family and friends are back home and you're overseas. Dealing with hard times, not everything is glamorous, I had my parents and friends to support me the whole ride. I couldn't have done it without them."
Every day, Kenny Stamatopoulos called home. Every, single day. Sometimes just to say hi, sometimes to unburden himself.
"We know when my brother is down," said Steve Stamatopoulos, "whether it be soccer-related or being lonely in different parts of the world. We actually go through the journey together.
"They have always supported me, even in tough times, they found a positive way to look at things," said Kenny. "When you have your head down, you have anger and negativity, that's where they come in. They put positive energy into me. They build me up."
The journey took Stamatopoulos first to Greece, then the Swedish Elite League and finally Norway but with closeness comes pain. Nick Stamatopoulos fell from the second story on a construction jobsite. He would be bedridden for five years because of the accident.
They found Kenny three years ago in Sweden with word that Steve might not survive a terrible car accident. He was in a coma for three weeks.
"When I came out of it, there was my brother beside me," he said. "I said what are you doing here."
"I see some brothers and sisters, they live kilometers apart but they really are a lot further in terms of their feelings. My brother was right by my side. I couldn't believe, he just left everything."
Stamatopoulos has fared pretty well for TFC. He had come to the end of the road with his team in Norway so he could move easily back home. He has allowed three goals in two games but injuries to strikers Danny Dichio and Jeff Cunningham have grounded the team's attack. In neither one of Stamatopoulos's games have his teammates scored. Goalie Greg Sutton has been lost because of a concussion suffered with the Canadian national team so Stamatopoulos's audition should be a season-long one.
Home at last, in front of his parents, it could only be better for the Stamatopoulos clan if Christina could watch her son. The one out there all by himself.
Mike Ulmer is a contributor to MLSnet.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Soccer or its clubs.
