CHICAGO — The biggest goal so far for the club in 2023 came from a player who is still quite new to the franchise. But he’s certainly no rookie when it comes to Major League Soccer.

Yet 38-year-old Kei Kamara looked quite young when he made his run toward the goal in stoppage time on Saturday night against Inter Miami CF on the road. With one shot, he made a little more history in America’s top soccer league.

The forward notched the game-winner in a 3-2 triumph for the Fire that gave them their first victory of the still very young 2023 season. In the process, Kamara added to his lengthy resumer in MLS along with the Fire’s own record book.

In his 16th MLS season, he became the first in league history to score a goal with ten different clubs since making his debut with the Columbus Crew in 2006. It was his 140th tally of his career, which is third all-time in league history and just five behind Landon Donovan for second.

Kamara became the oldest player in Fire history to score a goal, doing so at 38 years, six months, and 24 days old. He broke the record held by Arlington Heights native Brian McBride, who was a little over two months younger.

Incredibly, it was the first game-winning stoppage time goal of his MLS career, coming in his 394 the game.

Yet afterward, Kamara wasn’t dwelling much on another record-setting score as much as he was encouraged by the play of the young team around him.

“I’m going to be really, really bad today and people are going to think I’m lying, but it wasn’t really about my goal, or really focusing to say I’m scoring for another team and it was really about how we played the past, you know, three games and not being able to close it out and get a win,” said Kamara. “So it felt so much bigger than me scoring that goal for the rest of us because, you know, it gives us a lot of belief that what we’ve been working on, since I’ve been here for the past three, four weeks now, that it’s paying off.”

Certainly Kamara knows how to work with his manager, Ezra Hendrickson, as playing for him brings his career full circle. In 2006 and 2007, the pair were teammates with the Columbus Crew as Kamara was just beginning his career.

“I think it’s not good for me to let out that I play for somebody that I played with because the guys call me ‘Grandpa’ in the locker room, that’s really bad. I followed Ezra over the years, how he was working over in Seattle and back to Columbus, and we’ve always talked. We’ve always talked about the game and what he’s going to do when he becomes a head coach of a team, and I believed in him all these years,” said Kamara of Hendrickson. “So I was really happy, even last season, I was happy that he was the leader of the team here. But I remember when we played against this team and I said to him that ‘I want to play for you but it’s not happening, so I’m going to punish you today,’ and that’s what happened last year.”

Larry Hawley featured Kamara in this edition of “Random Hawlight” on WGN News Now, which you can watch in the video above.