One night, when I was married, during Crystal Palace’s first year back in the Premier League, I went to a home match that we won. I got in at around midnight and woke my wife with an enthusiastic shake. ‘Oh my God, what is it?’ she cried, possibly imagining the house was on fire. ‘We’re 15th’, I said.
It is a testament to the priorities of most people that we don’t choose our football club because we think they will win. We become part of the club because of where we live or our family connections.
Fans of Walsall or Plymouth don’t end every season thinking ‘Oh no, yet again we haven’t won the Champions League, I wonder if I should have chosen a different team’.
When I was 18 I moved to Crystal Palace because a friend was living there in a road of filthy squats and it seemed exciting to go with him.
I went to watch the local team and learned the rituals, of singing Glad All Over as the players come out, the other songs, wearing red and blue and moaning about the players.
One week, during a terrible game, Palace equalised with a mishit shot that bounced off someone’s backside and the ball bobbled just over the line.
The man behind me shouted ‘Marvellous. I’ve always said football’s better when both teams are s***e’.
Ever since those days I have yelped, cringed, grimaced, roared and contorted myself into unfathomable shapes, according to whether my team has conceded a penalty, hit the post, scored or had a decision referred to VAR.
I took my son along for the first time when he was four. About halfway through the second half, he complained about being bored and wanted to go home.
Then one week he said, ‘I’m fed up’. I said, ‘There’s only 20 minutes left’ and he said, ‘It’s not that, I want us to score’. I knew I had inflicted all this on him.
Since then, we have been to hundreds of matches around the country together. Other families might go to therapy to learn to express affection, but we hug each other because Jean-Philippe Mateta has just equalised against Brentford.
Most football clubs uphold the same sense of quirky local pride that I sense in every town I visit for my radio series. Locals love the daft idiosyncrasies that make their place unique, without in any sense believing this makes them better than other towns, their clubs or their fans.
Unless you are a fan of one of the top clubs you don’t expect annual glory, you celebrate the joyous sense of community from a shared journey of hope and disappointment.
Twice, Palace nearly went out of business, the current owners rescuing it from the brink of bankruptcy. A side made up of players who could not get into the second division teams they played for, along with Wilfried Zaha — who was brought up next to the ground — got the team promoted into the Premier League and we have been there ever since. We play among top clubs that are no longer owned by wealthy businessmen, they are owned by economic regions.
So most of the country supports the smaller club if they get to a final, as they adored Leicester’s Premier League title or Wigan’s FA Cup win. They were little reminders that obscene wealth does not guarantee victory in football or in life.
This year it is Palace’s chance to break the rules, as we take on Manchester City in the FA Cup final.
It would be so much easier to cope if we had almost no chance, but we have a team that excites even the top pundits, that has been put together with tremendous vision, by collecting wonderful previously unknown players, and a gloriously calm and astute manager in Oliver Glasner.
So for me, every moment is more jittery than the last. I have imagined every possible way Palace could win, including a 5-4 victory after being 4-0 down, a 1-0 win from a last-minute own goal by Erling Haaland, a volley from our goalkeeper Dean Henderson that gets caught in a freak gale and floats 100 yards into the goal, or a 97-96 win on penalties.
For City fans, this game will not matter too much. In 20 years’ time, many of them will not be able to distinguish it from their other 20 trips to Wembley around this time.
It will be just another day out, no more memorable than the day they popped to Homebase for some shelving brackets.
Their fans will arrive in their seats five minutes before kick-off, chatting about the roadworks on the M6.
But the Palace end of Wembley will be packed an hour earlier, everyone’s guts and bowels revolving like the spin cycle of a 40-degree wash.
We will roar like a jet engine, urging, willing and screaming as we carry the memories of thousands of hours, of rickety turnstiles and rushing through Croydon to get to games, and loved ones who have had to put up with our love for a team that has never won a trophy, but now it might, it just might.
And if we do, we will all float back to south London on a wave of elation and wake anyone in the world who is asleep to let them know we have won the FA Cup.