Knowledge Is Money

The party found its own way home near 2 in the morning, and I stayed the last man in the ground, the way I have always ended up the last man in the ground.

Marsh Road was a wreck of it. Paper cups in drifts against the hoardings, dropped scarves, a single child’s shoe left on the centre spot like somebody had set it down on purpose. tk, a bottle rolled a foot on the concrete and gave up.

I walked out onto the grass, which a chairman has no business doing, and stood on the halfway line in the dark with my shoes going wet through.

Up on the black gable the wonky white T leaned over the sleeping town the way it has leaned my whole life. Somewhere off across the dark streets a last knot of them was still going, thinned out and refusing to pack it in.

"TIL-BROOK. TIL-BROOK."

Ted was one of the last with me, on a plastic seat in the front row, a crushed paper hat in his fist.

"You should be home, Ted. Think of your heart."

"My heart is grand. It has waited 60 years for a night it could not stand, and here it still is, standing." He looked out at me stood in the middle of the pitch like a fool. "Come off the grass, son. You will catch your death, and then who runs the place."

"In a minute. I wanted to stand on it the once, while it is ours and quiet, before the League One lot start telling us what we are."

"Aye." Ted understands most things if you give him the second. "I keep thinking he would have loved it. My old man. He would have said nothing and cried into his cap, and called me a soft article for crying into mine."

"He would be proud you stayed to the last."

"He never got a last, my dad. Went to his grave with this club stuck exactly where it stood the day he first carried me through that turnstile."

"Then tonight was half his, Ted."

"Do not." He put a hand up, and got himself back. "Do not set me off again, I have only just dried out. Come and lock up, you daft article, before we are both crying into caps that are not even ours."

The party had washed down into the guts of the ground, and it was still going strong when I came in off the grass.

Somebody had the tannoy playing an old song nobody could name, thunk, thunk, the bass of it coming through the breeze-block. Bald Tony was up and down the corridor with his hand bell like a town crier who had lost the plot. ding, ding, ding.

"League One, Mr Mercer," he shouted at me, and rang the bell an inch from my ear. "I have been ringing this bell for a bad club my whole life. Tonight I am ringing it for a good one."

"Go easy on it, Tony. It has to last us the summer."

"It will last. I will not." ding, ding. And off he went.

Murat and Erol had thrown the kiosk shutter up and were handing chips to anyone who passed, both of them weeping over the fryer. hiss of the baskets going down.

"On the house," Erol shouted, thrusting a tray at me. "League One chips. Everything is League One now, Mr Mercer. The tea, the chips, the queue at the bogs."

"You will bankrupt yourself in one night, Erol."

"Let me. My father sold cigarettes outside this ground when it had a fence round 3 sides and a cabbage field on the 4th. Let me give away chips the night it goes up. Let me."

The dressing room was 3 songs deep and soaked to the walls in cheap fizz. fzz, another bottle went off over somebody’s head.

Prentice, the captain we bought out of a fire in March, stood in the middle of it with his shirt gone and both arms round 2 lads whose names he learned in the spring, bellowing a chorus he could not have known a season ago.

"Chairman." He saw me in the door and hauled me in by the sleeve before I could get away. "Say the thing. Go on. Say we are up."

"You are up, Sean."

"Louder. He cannot hear you." He meant Marsh, the old captain, 33 and grinning like a boy, both fists in the air.

"WE ARE UP," I said, and 20 grown men fell on me, and I went under a wave of lager and amber and arms and did not fight it.

Gray got an arm free and shouted in my ear over the din. "You wrote the top down for me, boss. On paper. I have not forgot it."

"You did the running. I only pointed."

"Aye, well, keep pointing." He was 20 years old and lit up like a bonfire. "I am going all the way up, me. You said so. You do not get to be wrong."

Doyle, who runs the academy now and had laced his boots one last time in an emergency this season, had a kid of his own on his shoulders in the corner, showing him the mess of it, telling him to remember it.

Danny Vine was in the doorway with his notebook shut in his hand for once. 20 years of covering a losing club and he had the look of a man let out of somewhere.

"I have written a lot of sad Mondays about this place, Sam," he said. "I get to write the good one now. I have been practising it in my head since Christmas and I still cannot get the top line down."

"You will get it. You always do."

"Not this. This one I would do for nothing." He put the notebook in his pocket. "First time in my career I would rather stand in it than write it."

Terry Brennan, who has sponsored the shirt for 11 seasons and hated Ray Sully for 20, pressed a large scotch into my hand I had not asked for.

"To beating the money," he said. "To every chequebook that got left in the play-offs while a proper club walked up the stairs. I have waited half my life to raise a glass to that, and I am raising it now."

Wilf found me by the boot room with a half of mild going warm in his hand, watching the young ones sing.

"40 years I have done this," he said. "Watched other men’s clubs go up on players I dug out of nowhere, and got a nod for it if I was lucky. This is the first side that was ever mine to stand in the middle of."

"Half that dressing room is your eye, Wilf. You know it is."

"It was looking. Same as it always was." He drank. "But I will take the once, tonight, and let it have been more than looking. Tomorrow it goes back to being looking."

Sadler stood apart from all of it in the far doorway, a can in his hand he was not drinking, watching the room the way a joiner watches a thing he built take the weight.

"You could have that face on you as well, Craig," I said. "We went up."

"I have the face on that I have." Which is the most Sadler sentence there is. He tipped the can an inch at the room. "That, though. That is the bit I do it for. Not the table. That."

"One more year of it. You gave me your word on the stairs."

"And you will get your year." He got halfway to turning round, thought better of it, the way he does. "Go and be in it, chairman. They do not want you stood in a doorway being a manager at them. That is my job, and I am off duty for one night."

Vardy was in the far corner with a bottle of water, not the fizz, watching it all with the small private smile of a man who has been the quietest one in every loud room of his life.

He lifted the bottle an inch when he caught my eye. That was Vardy’s whole party, and it was plenty for him.

They put us on an open-top bus on the Sunday, because the town asked for it, and the town does not ask for much.

I had said it was too grand for a club our size. Maureen looked at me over the green book and said a homecoming costs the price of the bus and buys 10 years of goodwill.

She would not be talked out of a thing that came in that cheap. So we hired the bus.