It’s been nearly 15 years since North Catholic closed. Someone forgot to tell the Norphans.

North Catholic was always one of the city’s soccer powerhouses, but the Falcons went more than a decade without a championship. So it isn’t hard to guess what the group of boys from the River Ward neighborhoods in Northeast Philadelphia did after capturing that Catholic League title in November of 1990.

“We went out partying at Joey Murtagh’s house in the neighborhood,” Mike Maciocha said. “The whole team was there, and the parents. We had a good time. That day was just pure joy. It was great.”

They were champions again — finally — and a big reason was the kid from Glendale Street in Juniata Park who stood in net that season. Billy Seifert transferred from La Salle, played a year of JV, and gave North the goalie it needed to win it all. Like the rest of the Falcons, he was a neighborhood kid who loved soccer. And that’s how they’ll remember him this weekend.

It’s been nearly 15 years since the archdiocese closed the all-boys school on Torresdale Avenue, but North’s alumni refuse to let their school — or the memories of guys like Seifert — fade away. They graduated decades ago and still wear North shirts, have Falcons license plates, sit on the beach in NC hats, and fly red flags from their Shore balconies.

They reunite each summer to raise scholarship money for students to attend Catholic schools that were once considered rivals. And they toast the memory of guys like Seifert, who died in June from colon cancer at 49.

“They closed North and somebody forgot to tell us,” said Jerry Brindisi, who was North’s last soccer coach and helped launch the Norphans alumni group after the school closed. “And we’re like, ‘We’re not going away on this.’”

The Norphans — the North Catholic guys felt like “orphans” when their school closed — provide tuition assistance to children or grandchildren of former Falcons who are attending Catholic schools. They help kids attend schools like Father Judge, Archbishop Ryan, Camden Catholic, and St. Hubert.

The school’s alumni association — a powerful group even before North closed — gives more than $500,000 in scholarships every year. The Norphans are an offshoot of that. They bring in money from sponsors and hold events throughout the year, none bigger than Saturday’s reunion at Keenan’s in North Wildwood.

“We try to spread the umbrella wide and help as many people as we can help,” said Mike McBride, who is on the Norphans board. “My wife will say, ‘Does $500 mean a lot to people?’ And I say, ‘We’ve had people come up to us who we don’t even know and say my dad got out in whatever year and they’ll tell us that the $500 helped with her fees or this and it was the impetus for that kid to stay in for another year.’ We get so many people who support us, it’s wonderful.”

Seifert loved North Catholic — “That was his thing his whole life,” his wife, Diane, said — so it meant something that his daughter was a Norphans scholar at Little Flower, North’s “sister school” in Hunting Park. He even found himself back on the sidelines coaching the school’s field hockey team last year when it became clear his daughter’s team would not have a season without a coach. Seifert knew little about field hockey but the guy who coached the freshman team months after graduating high school knew just what to do.

“He was battling cancer at the time,” Diane Seifert said. “And hid it from everyone because he just wanted to be there.”

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There was no professional soccer in town in the 1980s, so playing for North felt like the big time to kids who grew up in neighborhoods like Kensington and Port Richmond.

Pat Morris dreamed of playing for the Falcons, just like his older brothers. So it’s easy to understand how thrilled he was in the fall of 1991 when Seifert returned to coach the freshman team just months after helping North win that title.

Morris played college soccer and had a long pro career, but there was something special about being a teenager and playing for a Catholic League champ for the team he always wanted to represent.

“I’m North through and through,” Morris said. “Wherever I go, I represent North. I tell everybody I’m from North. I’ve done a lot on the soccer field, but I’m super proud of being from North Catholic.”

Morris spoke at a North banquet a few years ago and saw alumni from other Catholic schools in the room. They think they had what North had, Morris said, but they didn’t. There was something different about the school a few steps from the El tracks.

It was considered at one point to be the world’s largest Catholic high school for boys. They had Justice Under God, the Pit, the Oblates, a “swimming pool” on the roof, the JV basketball team that won a playoff game, and all those Catholic League plaques. But there was something more about the place that keeps the North guys connected to a school that’s no longer open.

“What makes us different? It’s just who we are as people,” Morris said. “So many people who support North and follow us are women. They’re people who didn’t even go to North. It’s moms and sisters whose family went to North. We’ll have our alumni thing and have 2,200 people. They’re not all guys. I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s cult-ish. It’s hard to describe why, but I think it’s just the people. The people who grew up in these neighborhoods and they’re prideful of where they came from. They always come back and support.”

“I grew up in Juniata, which people say, ‘Oh, that was Kensington with grass,’” McBride said. “I was one house off Erie Avenue and we didn’t have any grass. But you met people at North from different neighborhoods and you said, ‘Ah, they’re just like people from my neighborhood.’ You became lifelong friends and nothing’s ever changed. I’ll go on vacation and in the airport, I’m wearing a North shirt and a guy comes up to me and says, ‘What year?’”

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Seifert played every summer in the alumni soccer game, so his North buddies will wear his Philadelphia police badge — Seifert followed his dad into the department and spent 27 years as a cop — on their jerseys Saturday morning at Bill Henfey Park on 8th Avenue in North Wildwood.

“To listen to them talk about all of North, you kind of have a little sense of jealousy that you don’t have that connection with your high school, that love,” Diane Seifert said. “At his funeral, the amount of guys who stepped up and said, ‘He coached me. He was phenomenal.’ It hit me then how many people he touched through coaching and through North. He was a phenomenal person, a mentor and a coach. He was just a real person.”

Seifert’s body was slowing down in March and his cancer was no longer a secret, but Seifert willed himself to attend the school’s soccer banquet. His 1990 team — the Falcons who topped Bonner for the title — were being inducted into the Hall of Fame. The goalie had to be there.

“It was awesome. You could tell he wasn’t feeling good but he wanted to be there for his teammates and made sure he was there,” said Maciocha, who grew up four houses from Seifert. “He wasn’t just sitting there and being sick. He was getting into the conversations and trying to seem healthy, but you knew deep down that he was hurting.”

Seifert saw all his buddies again that night, held the old trophy, and enjoyed one more night with the North guys. They weren’t stuffed in Murtagh’s house after winning the Catholic League title but maybe it felt like that.

He died three months later and his wife placed his red North blanket into his coffin. The last line of his obituary requested donations to Norphans, whose website says, “Our Alma Mater may be closed, but the Falcon spirit shall never die.”

“It was just a blue-collar place,” Brindisi said. “It’s hard to put your finger on it. It was just a feeling, I guess.”