Port Vale. Our drug, our beautiful madness, the ache in the bones and the fire in the chest. Not glory, not really. Mostly cold hands and long train journeys home. The hollow feeling when the final whistle goes against you again. It’s the boarded-up shops and town hall angel watching over Burslem. The old mother town carrying its scars.

It’s oatcakes before dawn and pints before noon, the same faces in the same pubs telling the same stories because some things deserve repeating. It’s walking up Hamil Road beneath a sky the colour of wet concrete and wondering why you keep doing this to yourself. Why you keep spending your Saturdays chasing something that so often lets you down.

Then a ball drops from the clouds in the ninety-third minute. And suddenly none of it matters.

The misery, the defeats, the winter afternoons when every misplaced pass feels like a personal insult. Gone. Swept away in an instant of noise and limbs and strangers embracing strangers. Vale Park shaking beneath your feet. A roar rising from deep within Burslem itself, as if every kiln and cobble and terrace house had found a voice. That’s the trick of it. Vale gives you just enough. Just enough light in the darkness to keep you coming back.

We don’t want the cure. Never did. Not once. We want the roar and the silence, the hope and the hurt, the glorious waste of Saturdays surrendered to a cause that can break your heart a hundred times and still have you coming back for more. We want the grey afternoons and the golden minutes, the heartbreak and the redemption, the small miracles that bloom from nowhere beneath the floodlights.

Because in this delirium, in this grand and beautiful affliction, we are alive. We are together. We are Vale.