Saturday is coming. Quarter-finals of the FA Cup. Away at Chelsea. It’s just sitting there on the horizon like some great shimmering promise or threat – I can’t quite tell which, and that’s half the thrill. I’m letting go of all the suffering Vale have been inflicting on me; I’ve got no use for it. Besides, I’m sure it’ll still be there for me to pick up again next week. Right now I’m living for the mad possibilities of this weekend. From here on in, it’s nothing but astonishment, rage and adrenaline.

My head is already there, in West London, already wandering through those blue gates, already hearing that roar – Vale! Vale! Vale! – bouncing of the steel and concrete of Stamford Bridge.

And it’s building up inside me too – the promise of mayhem and madness, of unfiltered chaos and joy. That emotional freefall only Vale can summon up from somewhere deep inside us. Six thousand manic souls becoming a roaring, surging, half-feral testament to belief itself. A celebration of who we are, where we’re from and what this club means to us.

And travelling with us, tucked into every pocket, hanging from every black & white scarf and rattling around every coach aisle, is the most beautiful companion in the whole world: nothing to lose. The purest freedom known to humankind. It walks beside us, grinning, whispering in our ear that this – this exact moment – is what it feels like to be alive.

Because life is sweet when we’re facing it with nothing to lose. When the world stops with all its constant demands, its stresses, its deadlines, its never-ending bullshit and misery, and gives us the day off. When you can stare down a giant not with fear but with mischief. When you can step into a stadium built for kings and play like street urchins who’ve nicked the crown jewels for a laugh.

And there’s that question – that question which has been hanging around for days now, pestering and mithering me when I’m trying to sleep or make a cup of coffee or pretend I’m actually doing some work.

What if Chelsea shit the bed?

What if they actually do it? Totally and completely shit the bed?

Not just shit the bed a tiny bit, but suffer a full, sprawling, unignorable catastrophe.

Because yes, it would need to be that spectacular. We’re talking Spud in Trainspotting levels of industrial‑grade duvet devastation here – sheets ruined, Shirley Henderson sitting at the breakfast table covered from head-to-toe. That’s the territory we’re dealing with. That’s the level of absurd cosmic intervention required for our wildest, most hallucinatory dreams to shimmer out of the haze and become manifest.

And yet – and yet – Chelsea, this sleek, modern footballing monolith, have been wobbling like a shopping trolley with cursed front wheels. In recent weeks they’ve shown themselves capable of lapses. Weird ones. Inexplicable ones. Moments where you can almost see the soul leave the bodies of every single player on the pitch. I’ve watched them a couple of times since we discovered our fate, partly out of research, partly out of morbid curiosity, and let me tell you: they’re not great. Not by any stretch.

There’s no one who galvanises them – no natural leader who grabs the game by the scruff of the neck and forces everyone else to believe. They just don’t have that player. Cole Palmer, who for months had been drifting around like some kind of Premier League spirit guide, appears to have powered down. Their keeper would struggle to get a game in League One, flapping at crosses like someone who’s been surprised by the concept of football itself. And Garnacho, well, he just looks odd. There’s something about his face – it’s too gaunt, too waxy. It’s like he stepped straight out of an early 70s Hammer Horror fever dream: half‑human, half‑apparition, lingering in that uneasy space between life and lifelike. It’s unnerving.

You can smell the doubt on them. They lack belief in themselves. Liam Rosenior looks like someone trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube that keeps adding extra sides every time he turns it. The edges fray with every press conference, every backwards pass. And the thing is – and this part is inescapable – we could be the final straw. We genuinely could. The little shove that sends the whole collapsing Jenga tower sliding across the coffee table. The moment that turns a rocky patch into a full-blown existential crisis at Stamford Bridge. Imagine the fall-out if we win.

Let’s not get too carried away though. We can’t ignore just how abysmal we’ve been this season. There’s nowhere to hide from it. The table doesn’t lie. We’re nailed to the bottom of League One for a reason. It’s not planets misaligning or bad luck or anything mystical. It’s just us, sitting exactly where we deserve to be. We don’t score enough. We don’t create enough. We give away sloppy goals. Put it all together and you get the perfect storm: every ingredient you need for relegation, mixed and baked by our own hand.

Of course, Saturday could very easily be carnage. It probably will be. But that doesn’t matter. The day belongs to us. It’s ours, regardless of the result.

However, we can all do our bit for FA Cup glory. We can all play our part. These moments aren’t born of logic; they’re summoned by ritual – tiny gestures, quiet superstitions. We can leave our offerings, our sacrifices, our symbolic tokens at the feet of those mischievous gods of night‑time incontinence, those ancient sprites who preside over the slippage between certainty and chaos. They are the ones who decide, on some moonlit whim, whether a Premier League giant wakes in pristine sheets or in something closer to a crime scene.

Will they smile upon us? Who knows. They’re unpredictable, those deities. Fickle, capricious, easily distracted. They might choose to bless us, or they might wander off halfway through the match to look at something shiny. We can only hope.

We’re not asking for too much here. We’re not demanding some irreversible decline in Chelsea’s fortunes. We can wedge in a polite clause, a humane little caveat: Please, benevolent spirits of the unexpected calamity, let Chelsea never shit the bed again for the rest of this season or the whole of next season after you allow us this one, tiny, small, inconsequential, historic, magical moment.

And still, that thought won’t let go. The Quarter-finals! Vale on the threshold of something that feels almost mythological. It’s ludicrous. It’s impossible. It’s something I will probably never experience again in my lifetime.

And, as King Lear might well shout into the storm, the FA Cup has seen us more sinned against than sinning this millennium. Canvey Island, Scarborough, Chasetown, King’s Lynn – all lining up to make an absolute mockery of us. The hurt we have suffered. The humiliation we have suffered. Beating Bristol City and Sunderland doesn’t settle that score. Not even close.

We are still owed. We are still due. Whether the universe likes it or not, out there somewhere there has to be at least one more giant scalp waiting for us. At least one more. Why not Saturday? Why not Chelsea?

This is football, after all. The game where logic sometimes steps aside. The game where the rich and powerful sometimes trip over their own shoelaces in full view of millions. The game where, once in a blue moon, everything lines up perfectly – our dreams, our hopes, our visions – and something utterly magnificent and utterly beautiful happens.

Let the dream live. No matter how unhinged it feels.

Give us chaos. Give us madness.

Because that’s where the magic always hides.