It’s Friday morning. About 10.30am. You’ve once again not slept brilliantly the night before, you’ve just poured yourself a coffee and you’re stuck in the weekly paradox of wanting your 15-minute break to last an eternity, but simultaneously wanting your working day over with at the speed of lightning so your weekend can get underway.
You’ve already forgotten the song you’ve just heard through your headphones, as the next one starts up. As you hear Elton John sing, ‘She packed my bags last night, pre-flight; Zero hour, 9 a.m.’, you are snapped out of the mundanity of your 9-5 routine.
You don’t need to open the video via Sunderland AFC’s official social media channels, you don’t even need to close your eyes, you can see the ball deflect improbably to the feet of Tommy Watson, you see the ball travelling impossibly slowly, but somehow sped up compared to the version you saw at Wembley, trickle into the bottom corner. You see the teenager from Horden Colliery run over to the ecstatic red and white army, you see Enzo Le Fee sink to the ground, you see the camera pan, you see you and your dad bouncing all over, both hugging a man you did not know the name of and had only met a couple of hours before.
And then it starts again, you are not sat on the fifth floor of an unremarkable office block, you are back at Wembley Stadium with Carnival De Paris blasting, you’re jumping all over, you then realise that your brain has stored the lyrics to Bob Sinclair’s ‘rock this party’, which for some reason is blaring out of the public address system. The lads stand in front of the fans, arms around each other singing ‘can’t help falling in love.’
You open Twitter on your phone, and watch the video of Patrick Roberts insisting that Le Bris gets involved with the trophy lift in front of the supporters and the Frenchman, almost sheepishly obliging.
You are probably grinning to yourself like an idiot, you don’t care.
That night, you settle down and watch yet more footage from the day at Wembley, the away leg at Coventry, Dan Ballard’s last gasp winner in the second leg and still five weeks on from sealing promotion you can’t help but feel that warm glow all over again.
You also notice something different each time you watch it, you notice an opposition player react in resigned disbelief as Ballard’s header comes crashing down off the bar and bounce up into the back of the net, you notice yet another player jump into the crowd, you laugh as you notice another close up of celebrating fans as Frankie Francis screams “I’ve never seen scenes like it!” into his microphone.
Right now, supporting Sunderland feels like waking up from a fantastic night out where you know you have massively over indulged but you don’t have a hangover and you don’t have a sense of impending dread of doom. You don’t trust, it is not natural.
Of course, everything will not be rosy forever, undoubtedly there will be weekends next season where the only sensible solution you can think of, is to drink 8-13 pints of Guinness and ring your parents just to tell them to fuck off for brining you up as an SAFC fan; and if you are able to look at December’s fixtures without feeling violently sick, you are a braver person than me.
However, far from sobering me up, the passage of time is making me feel even better about the future of the club and even more grateful for that moment of inspiration from Tommy Watson.
Firstly, if things had panned out differently on Saturday, May 24, the chain of events that followed doesn’t bear thinking about.
Jobe Bellingham would have still left, but at a much lower price, Le Fee would be back in Rome right now and while we still face a summer of rumoured outgoings, we now have a very good chance of retaining most of our top talent.
Instead of sealing deals for club record fees, we would be facing an uphill battle to sign quality replacements to replace our inevitable outgoings.
While it now seems improbable to even contemplate, the future of Regis Le Bris would undoubtedly be a topic on the lips of a sizable chunk of our fanbase.
While, the logic behind his decision to sacrifice form, results and momentum to ensure we peaked at the right time for the play-offs would still have been sound, the mood of football fans is very much outcome based and had we got off to a slow start, doubts over his future would have arisen.
Supporters would have also questioned our decision to make just one fit new signing in January and our drop off in form during the second half of the campaign would have been brought into laser focus.
Happily, all of that is academic now, Le Bris’s choices have been vindicated, we look set to make significant additions to our recruitment team, our playing staff and everyone is pulling in the same direction.
Despite all of this positivity, it is almost certain that we will be in a relegation battle, statistically it is still likely that we will go down, but we can worry about that if it comes.
Right now it just feels so refreshing to not only look back on the events of our promotion with misty eyed sentimentality, but to have reasons to be optimistic.
Should the worst happen, this feeling cannot be taken away, during our stint in League One, this feeling felt a million miles away.
A child starting comprehensive school in 2017 will now be 19 years old and will soon be making plans with their mates in the group chat about where to start their pre-match pub crawl for the West Ham game.
Fathers and Mothers will be taking their sons and daughters to their first Premier League game and youngsters who have only witnessed their favourite opposition players on the TV, will get to see them in person.
But for now, let’s all savour the feeling of not only loving the club unconditionally but being proud and upbeat about it.
