Stjarnan

Stjarnan's women meet Afturelding, the club from neighbouring Mosfellsbær, and the two sides have spent decades trading the Icelandic Championship between them without either town giving the fixture a name that stuck. What the rivalry never had in slogans, Stjarnan's women made up for on the scoreboard: seven league titles between 1991 and 2009, and seven cups stretching all the way to 2016, a run that made Kvennastjarnan, as the side is known, the defining handball team to come out of Garðabær.

The men's side has lived in a different rhythm, closer to the club's roots as a project of two educators, Rev. Bragi Friðriksson and Vilberg Júlíusson, who set Stjarnan up in 1960 with sport meant to give the town's young people somewhere to go. Their team has taken the Icelandic Cup four times, twice in the late 1980s and twice more in 2006 and 2007, and has twice had to win its way back up from Division II, in 1982 and again in 2016.

Rakel Dögg Bragadóttir belongs to the club in both roles the women's side has needed: she captained the national team during her playing days and later carried that experience into coaching at Stjarnan, one of the few figures to have shaped the club from both sides of the touchline.

Matches are played at TM-höllin, a hall holding around 2,000 that sits at the modest end of the country's handball venues but has been full often enough, on the nights Stjarnan's women were chasing another title, to feel like Garðabær's whole population had turned out.