As the seconds tick away at the Stadium of Light, there is a strange atmosphere in the air. It’s the 120th minute and Coventry City have a corner. We just need to survive this, but even if we do, relief will be in short supply.

Surely, we are just delaying the inevitable. A penalty shoot-out is simply unthinkable: we have missed our last four penalties in the league, including two in one game at Turf Moor.

The visitors’ corner results in a tame header over the bar which facilitates a temporary loosening of the knot in our stomachs. Two minutes of added time. A sub? Now? Leo Hjelde coming on? He’s not going to be taking one, is he?

Despite this change, the lads are not settling for the horrifying prospect of penalties, and we win a throw-in deep inside the opposition half. A ball boy is quick to supply Trai Hume with the ball. We work an opening; the boy from Ballymena stands one up to the back post, and the ball is diverted out for a corner.

Thirty seconds to go. Enzo Le Fée acts as though he has all the time in the world. Seemingly every Sunderland fan is on their feet, roaring themselves hoarse. ‘Til The End flashes up on all the advertising hoardings. The sea fret descending over the Stadium is somehow more noticeable than before. Le Fée gives the crowd a “let’s lift this even more” gesture and kisses the ball.

He floats the corner in; Hjelde arguably has his finest moment in a Sunderland shirt as his movement frees up room inside the box and occupies Coventry defenders. Ballard jumps… too early, folds like a deckchair and somehow, he gets good contact on the ball. It pings off the bar, over the line, and bounces up into the roof of the net. For a split second, time stands still before pandemonium erupts.

The noise is ear-splitting. Family members, friends, and mostly complete strangers hug each other and jump all over the place. Dan Ballard wrestles with his shirt before eventually peeling it off. His team-mates dart off in different directions, and even Régis Le Bris temporarily loses his mind as he leaps about his technical area. Dan Neil, the lifelong Sunderland fan and captain, jumps into the crowd; Dennis Cirkin joins him for a spot of crowd-surfing. Smoke bombs collide with the sea fret, and the stadium is buried in a blanket of smoke and fog. As Frankie rightly pointed out: “I’ve never seen scenes like… I’ve never seen scenes like it!”

The celebrations barely have time to subside when Coventry eventually kick off. The referee immediately blows for full time, and the scenes are repeated all over again: there are tears, there are more hugs, more holding of loved ones and everything suddenly seems worth it.

An overused cliché is that “you couldn’t script drama like this”, as if the architects of the greatest pieces of cinema couldn’t conceptualise a stoppage-time winner after extra time. However, the cinema wasn’t just that night; it wasn’t just beating Coventry, it was everything that came before it.

It was suffering back-to-back relegations, winning just six home games across the two seasons, not winning at home for almost a full calendar year, failing to beat Burton Albion at home in four attempts.

It was missing out in the League One play-offs twice. It was missing out entirely in the curtailed season, seeing seemingly every opponent having a boyhood Mag, desperate to do the Shearer celebration, and being told that “this is our house and you play by our rules” by a no-mark from Wycombe.

It was being lectured about being “incredibly uneducated in business” by an unqualified “Hooray Henry”, and being told to simultaneously target 100 points but also know our place and be grateful for Madrox “saving the club”.

It was losing FA Cup First Round ties (plural) to Mansfield at home in front of three empty stands. It was Jon McLaughlin running to retrieve the ball against Gillingham from one of those empty stands. It was playing against Under-21 sides in the Pizza Cup/Checkatrade Trophy.

It was being a national laughing stock on Netflix. It was “never us celebrating”.

It was feeling as if the football club we had dedicated our lives to was a shell of itself.

It was the unbridled relief of finally escaping League One hell and the following season going through play-off heartbreak again after a memorable season.

It was Michael Beale replacing the popular Tony Mowbray, then going on a one-man mission to alienate as many people as humanly possible.

It was meekly surrendering to the Mags in the FA Cup, on and off the field.

It was the turnaround under Régis Le Bris, who, with the support of our recruitment team, revolutionised the club.

From 16th place and a year of striker hell, he identified Eliezer Mayenda and his raw potential, transformed the young striker’s fortunes, and was instrumental in Enzo Le Fée coming to the football club in January 2025.

There were still doubts, of course. After a blistering start, our form suffered slightly in the second half of the season, but it is worth noting that if our points total with five games to go was repeated in the 2025–26 campaign, we would have been second in the league.

The strategy from then on was bold: rotating the team and prioritising minutes on the pitch over points and results.

The final piece of any script was playing Coventry, a team we had failed to beat in our last ten attempts, and not beaten away from home since 1985.

The win at the CBS could feasibly be classed as “typical Sunderland”, a win against the odds to ignite everyone’s hopes after many had written us off. Everything in the home leg was even more “typical Sunderland”.

The bouncing atmosphere in the city in the build-up to the match; the anticipation; the welcome for the team bus; the pre-match display; the atmosphere reaching fever pitch followed by a relatively flat performance where we were out of possession for large spells.

But then we flipped the script. We kept going ‘Til The End and generated one of the most emotional moments ever seen on Wearside.

Tommy Watson’s moment at Wembley will rightly go down in history as the moment everything changed for Sunderland, but without 121:59, Wembley probably doesn’t even happen.

That goal against Coventry was a release of years of frustration, anger, hopelessness, despair and many emotions there are not adequate words to describe.

Sometimes, moments in our lives and memories appear in sharp HD vision. The limbs that followed the goal is certainly not one of those; honestly, I could not describe a second of the chaos that ensued. But the moment Dan Ballard’s header crashed down off the bar, I can picture it vividly, as if it is a photograph etched on my brain and knowing that we’d done it.

121:59. A moment enshrined in red-and-white folklore forever.