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Leander Wiegand knew very little about the NFL — or American football, for that matter — when his best friend urged him to check out something he saw on TV.

It was the day after the Super Bowl in February 2016 and Wiegand’s buddy Kolja turned on a replay of Peyton Manning's Denver Broncos beating Cam Newton's Carolina Panthers.

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The teens, sitting on a couch in Aachen, Germany, spent the next few hours mesmerized.

“We just thought Cam Newton was super cool, like, with the Superman pose and everything,” a smiling Wiegand recalled. “But yeah, that was the first football experience for me, my first time seeing football.”

That game sparked a winding journey that led the native of

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