Sunderland secured their place at Wembley with one of the most dramatic goals in the history of the Stadium of Light

A(nother) cross floats over from the right flank and you think, this is probably it.

It starts when Sunderland lose the ball under little to no pressure, Coventry suddenly swarming and out goes a tired, tired red-and-white leg to foul.

What follows is three minutes of Coventry control and build up. It’s horrible and it’s agonising because everyone in this ground can see and feel what’s happening. Sunderland are labouring, they don’t have the legs and the flow and the momentum is with those in sky blue. Somehow, Haji Wright heads wide. Frank Lampard tries to stay cool but his hands go to his face because this should have been the moment. It would have been an almighty heist but a deserved one too.

You can feel the relief in the air but also the trepidation. It’s exhausting.

Sunderland had laboured in the final weeks of the season but their performance in the first leg lit a fire under the city. It hadn’t been pretty but they had blocked and they had run and they had tackled and they had fought. Régis Le Bris said ‘This is Sunderland’ and the fans did, too.

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So they lined the streets to let their players know it. To say: we are here and we are going to bring the noise right until the bitter end. They sang for Eliezer Mayenda and their city and their team and in the smell of the flares and the sea of bodies it was as if a football club remembered just how powerful it could be. A city awake and completely together.

Sunderland just couldn’t match it, at least not for a long while. Le Bris admitted after there had been a tension in their performance, a puzzle that they couldn’t solve. The noise and the passion and the fever demanded intensity and a front-foot approach, but Sunderland were tethered by that one-goal lead. They worried understandably but too much about the spaces they’d leave behind, the counters that were so deadly here in the opening weeks of the campaign now too tentative. Their approach at Coventry had been more successful than anyone had dared hope but here it was all too rushed, too panicked. We are not Barcelona, Le Bris said in his pre-match press conference. Yeah, you can say that again.

But the crowd stayed with Sunderland, seizing on any glimpse of promise. The players had earned that, too. They have not always played fluid, eye-catching football this season but what they have almost always dug in, stayed together, found a way. For a team so young, they have shown an impressive willingness to suffer, to be humble tactically in the moments when the opposition have gained the ascendancy. So the crowd roars when Luke O’Nien races back to stop Wright running through on goal, and they sing as if their team are 3-0 up for as little as a throw-in that relieves the pressure for a moment or two. It just doesn’t feel like it’s going to be enough and it’s so bloody painful, a night that promised so much now threatening to haunt long into the future.

Le Bris turns the tide gently but unmistakably with two substitutions, first Chris Rigg and then Romaine Mundle. Mundle is called for within a minute of extra time, Le Bris having seen enough from its very first passage of play.

And as the fret begins to roll in Sunderland find their sea legs at last. In the briefest of half-time intervals they come together and agree to be bolder and braver. Not to worry so much about their opposition, dangerous as they are. Dan Neil starts to get on the ball, Le Fée begins to buzz. Mundle starts to push Milan van Ewijk back towards his own goal. There they are, the team that made Wearside dream again.

Were there another 15 to play then you would back Sunderland, but there aren’t. Le Bris and his staff start to talk penalties. Penalties. A gentle reminder that Sunderland have scored one in five so far this season. A centre back is subbed on to take one and Le Bris jokes afterwards that in training, he ‘wasn’t the worst’. You can hardly bear the thought of it.

It will seem like relief though, when Coventry City win a corner just as the clock edges towards 120. How far away those flailing limbs and that almost disbelieving roar feel in this moment.

Sunderland survive and there’s just time enough for them to edge up the right flank. The cross to the back post is a good one. Corner. Le Fée rallies the crowd briefly and then takes a breath. He kisses the ball, willing it to find that brilliant big head in the middle of the box. He swings it in and oh it’s perfect. Time stands still - 121:59. Then a moment you wish could last forever.

The funny thing is that in the context of Sunderland’s season this all might amount to nothing. Sunderland will kick off at Wembley the clear outsiders against a side bolstered by parachute payments and who finished fourteen points ahead of them in the table. It will be two teams playing for the dubious honour of a ten-month slog in a division that is increasingly chewing up promotion sides and spitting them back out. What’s truly something is how little any of that actually matters right now. It’s not what this is about, not really.

It’s about the new generation who have just in this moment fallen forever in love with Sunderland, to whom the Stadium of Light has just become sacred ground. It’s about those with them, who passed on the stories and the folklore in the hope that it would lead to a moment like this. A moment of sheer guttural joy that you just can never replicate, when the bodies are flying and the ears are ringing and no one knows where to run or what to do. When Dan Ballard can’t get his top off and Régis Le Bris looks like he’s about to burst out laughing. When Dan Neil is cramping in the stands and the subs are pouring onto the pitch. This feeling of ecstasy, of being part of something bigger, of being here with your people and able to forget about everything else just for a moment or two. To be able to show those watching what your city is truly about, the community and love and passion. On the pitch and in the stands they have come from so many corners of the world to be part of this. Not everyone was Sunderland when they were born but now they are all Sunderland ‘Til they die.

These moments have a legacy you cannot put a price on. They’re the moments that we pass on, to echo long after we’re gone. The moments that justify and entrench this quite absurd obsession. Big Dan Ballard, jumping too early, stooping low. Oh the tales they’ll tell about this one.

For Roly Humphrey, a true lads fan. RIP.

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