The weather behaved. The crowds came in their thousands. Callum Paterson wore an inflatable snake around his neck.
For all the lows, for the Forest Greens, for the oh-so-nearly of it all, Sheffield Wednesday signed off their record-breaking, promotion-winning campaign with a parade through the city. Automatic promotion? An easy way out.
It was a display of what this club is, what it has been and, deep down, what it always will be.
Darren Moore stood on the City Hall balcony and described the Wednesday support as some of the best in Europe. Hyperbole? Sycophancy? On the evidence of what stood before him, in the context of what the club has been through for the last two decades, it would be difficult to laugh-off the claim out of hand.
The bus – hey let’s be fair it had a look of a campervan about it – started at Devonshire Green in front of chanting supporters, flares and adoration. Rolling through the city, it ended at Town Hall and as the players wandered out to their public with medals round their neck and smiles on their faces.
It’s difficult not to think back to the feeling that football club was caked in as it shuffled through the turnstiles, media gates and players’ entrances of Peterborough United’s London Road stadium, 4-0 down and in the gutter.
Except it wasn’t. Not at its core, anyway. And as Moore found it within himself to stay up late into the morning planning next steps, as the players and staff around him flicked rapidly through the stages of grief to reach acceptance, something stirred.
And it all lead to this; from that big screen video message, from Michael Smith’s penalty spot opener.
From Lee Gregory’s toe poke, which rolled over the line almost politely but stirred something at Hillsborough stadium quite uncouth. Gregory’s dummy for a Reece James goal Moore himself said he celebrated harder than any other before.
From Palmer, Liam Jordan Worksop Cafu Palmer. Pato’s leveller. Hunty’s icy veins. Wembley. Windass. Immortality.
At the centre of the celebration was Barry Bannan. A man whose only task remaining in the eyes of a few in terms of club legend status was the lifting of a trophy. He walked around the civic reception with the air of a man complete, proud of his comrades and proud of his club, his manor.
The feeling within the reception was one of joy, relief and more pride. Players strode around chest-out, beers in hand, drinking in every last drop of celebration both metaphorically and, yes, literally. There were eyes bleary with the after-affects of a couple of heavy days. They were eyes well earned.
One Wednesday player tried to sign a Star reporter’s forehead with a marker pen.
David Stockdale had promised Bannan he would ride through the city on a horse if they’d won the league. On the day he had to settle for wearing a cowboy’s hat.
Would the Wednesday public have rather a title or the entrails of the last two weeks? Of Wembley, last minute drama and a parade in late May that nobody present would ever forget?
What a season. In the words of George Byers looking out on a sea of blue and white; ‘Jeezy Peeps’.
