This time next week - Sunderland fans can push Black Cats to end eight-year slog at Wembley

This time next week, we will be there. Beneath the arch - it’s grand silhouette sweeping high across a cloudless sky above the sun-dappled turf - a single metallic trill will lance the din, and Sunderland will find themselves 90 minutes away from ecstasy or agony. This time next week, the Championship play-off final will begin.

It is a football match that, from a Mackem perspective, has been eight years in the making. Who could have foreseen, all those seasons ago, when the Black Cats finally succumbed to the swift left hook of relegation, that almost a decade later, they would still be picking themselves up off the proverbial canvas, swatting cartoon cuckoos away from their ringing ears?

The period since has been, by just about any metric, an absolute slog. There have been countless false dawns and pitfalls, dead ends and setbacks. There have been snake oil salesmen and tears on Netflix, bemusing acquisitions and tragicomic plot twists. Since Sunderland were last in the top flight, lives have changed beyond recognition; loved ones have passed on, new fans have been unknowingly born into a life of Sisyphean devotion, hairlines have crept back, and, in some cases, vanished into the ether entirely. Mackems have become so accustomed to traipsing through the winding side alleys of the doldrums that they now know them like the back of their own hands.

But Saturday afternoon is an opportunity to put all of that behind us. After years of yearning, this might well be it. And it begins this time next week.

Except, of course, it doesn’t. Because in truth, it has already begun. It began the moment that Dan Ballard broke loose of his hapless marker, contorted himself into the ungodliest of positions, and angled a header in off the underside of the crossbar before a disbelieving Roker End. It began when the final whistle sounded and any lingering semblance of composure crumbled beneath the weight of unbound delirium. It began when Que Sera Sera was blasted over the PA system at the Stadium of Light and forty-odd thousand voices rose up to drown it out.

And still, we’re only just getting started. It will continue to bubble and simmer over the coming days; with every nod and smirk at a stranger sporting the club crest somewhere on their person in the dairy aisle at Tesco, like two smug members of a secret society meeting wordlessly out in the real world; with every kid, some of them barely old enough to have seen Laurens De Bock in the flesh, asking their mam and dad how many sleeps it is until Wembley; with every gaggle of red and white shirts spotted in various motorway service stations between here and the capital, every car that streaks past on the A1, familiar scarf trailing out of the passenger-side window.

Then there will be the giddy buzz of Covent Garden, and then on to Trafalgar Square; that de facto satellite state of the People’s Republic of Wearside, an annexed enclave where - if you ask any given passer-by, for one night only - they will tell you that the local delicacy is a pink slice and the national anthem is sung by The Futureheads.

The next morning, anticipation will creep - tetchy, hopeful, daring - over thousands of breakfast buffets, and surge along in stuffy tube carriages deep beneath the earth. It will spill out onto Wembley Way, scampering through turnstiles and crashing around concourses until it carries a red and white army up onto to the terraces and out into the moment of truth - fever pitch and football pitch together at last.

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Between now and then, the pundits will maintain that Sunderland are rank underdogs, and y’know what, they might be right. The column inches will stretch into column furlongs and then on into column miles, and nearly all of them will talk about things like parachute payments and January reinforcements and the irreplaceable value of prior experience.

But I was there on Tuesday night, and I witnessed the miracle. I glimpsed the promised land. And when it was all over I got a dustpan and brush out, I swept up the smithereens and the shrapnel of my expectations, faculties, and accepted wisdoms, and I dumped them into my back pocket, all to be superglued together again at an indeterminate point further down the line.

After eight years, all we need are 90 more minutes. Maybe 120, but let’s try not to think like that. And if a play-off final can be swayed by the sheer force of collective will alone, then Sunderland might just stand every chance. This time next week, the Championship play-off final will begin, and when the Mackems arrive, Wembley won’t know what has hit it.

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