The film's hero is a sports activist – Jerzy Piekarzewski, known as „Pekin”. He fell in love with sports as a young boy during the Second World War. It was then that he invested his youthful affections in the players of Polonia Warszawa, who achieved an honourable title in illegal sports competitions for the championship of Warsaw. The film's action begins in the late 1930s and continues to the present day. This spans nearly 80 years of Jerzy Piekarzewski's life, but also tells the long story of Warsaw with its tragic events. It was also a time of tremendous changes occurring throughout Poland – political, economic, and moral. The most important thread is, of course, the story of the main hero, who throughout his adult life must constantly fight to prevent his beloved sports club from being destroyed by the communist authorities. The price the hero pays for his consistent and uncompromising stance is the lack of normal family relationships with his wife and children, and later the loss of all his personal fortune due to investing private money in a club that never belonged to him.
