The second half was a war and I lost my voice over it and I’d do it again tomorrow. Crawley’s money at us in waves.

On 70 minutes their sub got clean through and Sid Hollis, 38 years old with 400-odd games of this club ground into his knees, came off his line and spread himself and got a glove to it he had no earthly right to reach, smack, and lay in the mud after grinning up at the black sky like a boy who’d nicked apples off a wall.

Big Pete came on for the last quarter, all six foot four, and headed away everything Crawley launched, thunk, thunk, delighted, useless with his feet, exactly the man for the minute. The new dad chased a lost cause into the corner nobody chases and won a throw and bought us 30 seconds, and his boy, three months old now, will be told about it.

And on 88 minutes, my last touchline, they scored me a goal I’ll carry to wherever it is my dad’s gone, which I’ve finally stopped needing to know.

The Wharf. My set piece. The one the young lad joked in the dressing room that Sadler had better not touch.

A free kick out on the right, and I watched Bailey put it exactly where we drilled it in the dark and the rain all autumn while cars went past wondering why the lights were on, onto the penalty spot, thwock, first door Doyle, who didn’t jump, who never jumps, who dummied it and dragged his marker two yards with him, and through the gap Doyle made came Cal Murphy, doing the two men’s jobs he’ll not have to do much longer, and Cal put his laces clean through it. rrrip. 2-1.

I have watched grown men do a great deal in two lives. I have never seen a football ground do what Marsh Road did then. It didn’t roar. It came apart at the seams. 3,100 people and a bell and a banner with a letter missing and a bloke in a technical area with two minutes left of the only job that ever fit his hands, and I did not stand there explaining it to myself the way I explain everything. I let it fall on me like proper weather and I thought, clear as a bell, one word. Enough. I’ve had enough of it now to last. Let me go up while it’s like this.

Peeeep. Peeep. Peep. Full time. We had beaten the money.

Then they came for me, and I’ll not be shy at the finish. They lifted me, my own players, up onto their shoulders, Lenny and Big Pete under the weight of me, and the whole ground found one voice.

"MER-CER. MER-CER. MER-CER."

My name off the terrace my dad stood me on. And I am not a man who gets carried, I’m a man who carries, but you have to let a thing be finished, so I let them, and from up on their shoulders I could see clean over the top of the whole of it, the Bovril End, the leaning white T against the last of the light, the exact patch of concrete, and I put my hand over my face like a boy of six and I wept where 3,100 people could watch me do it, and not one of them thought a pound the less of me.

Bill Mercer’s stool is empty in the corner of the Anchor tonight, by the dartboard, the way it’s been empty for years. And I would have handed over the beans, all 37,000 of them and every million they turn into, for that man to have had one seat in this ground for four minutes of this afternoon.

That’s the whistle I never got to give my dad. He stood me on a crate to watch other men’s sons, and died before he saw his own do a thing worth a line in the scrapbook, and I came back 40 years across death itself and still could not get him into a chair for the one hour that would have meant the world to him. That’s the tax on the miracle. Nobody warns you. It won’t let you keep the dead. It only lets you build them a thing they’ll never see.

They set me down.

The woman with the microphone got to me before I’d wiped my face, which is her job and I don’t blame her for it. "Sam, an emotional afternoon, what do you say to the fans?" And I looked down the lens at a town, and at a terrace, and at an old boy called Ted with his fist on his heart, and I said the only true thing I had.

"I’m not leaving you. I’m going upstairs to make sure there’s a here for you to come back to. Watch the space." Which was for one man, and he wasn’t there to hear it.

Sadler was on the edge of the grass by then, hands in his pockets, and he didn’t say well done and he didn’t say sorry.

He said, "Right. They’re mine Tuesday. I’ll not break them." The only sentence on earth I could have taken in that state. I shook his hand for the second time in a week and walked off the grass of Marsh Road as a manager for the last time, and I did not look back, because you know by now that looking back is for men who aren’t sure.

Eighteen days after that, on the 9th of February, a thing woke up in a corner of the future only I could see and ticked quietly past a dollar. 37,000 of them. No trumpet, no headline, a number on a screen going from red to green in the dark of my flat.

It isn’t a fortune yet, I told you that as a manager and I’ll not lie now I’m a chairman in a suit. It’s enough, pulled out careful the way you have to pull it out, to put a real barrister in a room on the 14th of March that last month I could not have afforded.

The fortune’s a summer thing, for the debt and the rebuild. But it woke on the exact day I said it would, and for the first time in eight months the sum I do in the dark had a plus in front of it.

And I did the private sum.

My mum’s mortgage, 1989 to now, three sugars, a boiler I’ve mended and a window that no longer whistles at her in the night. The number sat outstanding on her kitchen table like a held breath since before I was born.

I can clear it. Not in June. Now. And the very first thing my whole impossible future is going to buy, before a barrister, before a striker, before the debt that started all of this, is a paid-off little terrace off the high street and the look on my mother’s face while I tell her a lie about a union pension that finally came good.

There’s a chemist in West London I could still drive to. I know exactly where she stands on a wet Tuesday. I didn’t go. Not now, Karen. First things first, and the first thing has grey hair and three sugars and no idea her boy already saved her once, in the quiet, from a year she’ll never have to live.

Tuesday, Sadler takes them. I’ll be in the stand, in a seat, where my dad would have wanted one.

I thought that was the end of the hard part. I’d handed over the football, I’d said goodbye to the grass, the beans had woken, my mum’s number was as good as cleared. All that was left was a courtroom on the 14th of March, and I had a barrister for that now, and a case, and a town.

Then, on the Thursday, an envelope came to the office. Not from a court. Cream paper, a firm’s name on the flap, the same weight as the last one, and Maureen brought it up the stairs and didn’t set it down, just held it, because she’d learned what that paper means.

It wasn’t the tribunal. Sully hadn’t waited for March. He’d found a faster door, one I hadn’t locked because in 40 years and two lifetimes it had never once occurred to me he’d use it, and the single line on the second page told me exactly which one, and told me I had precisely nine days to stop him.

I read it twice. Then I laughed, out loud, alone in a cold office, because of course. Of course he had.

[SYSTEM] Final touchline: logged. Your last rating, and I don’t do sentiment, so take it as fact: 10. Bitcoin: awake. Objective SURVIVE: closed. New objective, filed this Thursday, priority: the man never comes at you the way you’re braced for. You have nine days. Turn the page, chairman.