It is more than 30 years since the sunny spring day which changed their lives unalterably and in all of that time David Duckenfield has been an emblem of the deceit which saw bereaved Liverpool fans unjustifiably blamed for the Hillsborough disaster.
The police commander at the FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest was the one who, having given the fateful order for an exit gate at the stadium to be opened, sending supporters funnelling down into pens where they died, calmly and publicly accused them of forcing it open.
'The lie' — as the author of the exhaustive Hillsborough Independent Panel (HIP), Professor Phil Scraton, has described it — went all around the world. It was immediately reported by BBC match commentator John Motson and that evening's television newsreader Moira Stuart. That mud stuck for very many years.
On Thursday, a retrial jury concluded that Duckenfield was not guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence that afternoon, bringing to an end the last vestige of hope among the families that the former South Yorkshire Police chief superintendent would be held criminally responsible.
Many hours of deliberation have preceded this day. A private prosecution at Leeds, 19 years ago, yielded a hung jury, as did the first trial at Preston Crown Court.
Yet the overwhelming feeling among Liverpool families on Thursday night was that Duckenfield had done what he has always done where Hillsborough is concerned: dissemble and disguise the truth. Consider the evidence he gave at the new inquests into the deaths of the 96 victims and the words of his legal team at the criminal trial and it is hard to avoid the sense that they have a point.
When he took his seat at the Warrington inquests into the 96 who died, which concluded in April 2016, Duckenfield was the picture of good health and confidence in the witness box: an upright, broad-backed, proud Yorkshireman, sipping water at first, and then orange juice, and defining the scope of his answers to barristers. 'Let me put it like this ma'am...' 'It was not how I recall that, sir.'
But his defence team at Preston Crown Court have played things very differently.
They portrayed him as an individual still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, who had been inadequately prepared by South Yorkshire Police for the task of policing the semi-final. They said he was now psychologically incapable of appearing to testify in his defence and be cross-examined.
At the Warrington inquests, Duckenfield admitted that he had lied about the causes twice on the afternoon of the disaster. It had been 'a terrible lie', he said. At the Preston court case, his QC Benjamin Myers denied that these admissions of failures, made on oath, were even admissions. They had been taken 'out of context,' he said.
At Warrington, Paul Greaney QC cut to shreds Duckenfield's notion that his actions on the day were based on his inexperience and ignorance of the geography of the ground, for which there must be a shared responsibility.
In an extraordinary deconstruction of his case, barely reported at the time, the barrister produced two pieces of evidence to demonstrate the officer had the knowledge to foretell precisely how disastrous his actions might be.
The first was an obscure item from Lord Justice Taylor's 1990 Hillsborough report, in which Duckenfield declared that he had attended a match when Millwall visited the ground and during which there had been the same cramming in the central pens where Liverpool's fans died. The second was a letter by Duckenfield to his own chief constable, suggesting he had also experienced the same crush in 1979.
There could only be an acceptance, Greaney put it to Duckenfield, that he had been in a complete state of panic and had frozen. 'Freezing is a physical action, is it not, or am I mistaken?' Duckenfield replied, with that swagger which has curiously vanished in the trial and retrial.
But by the end of a 90-minute cross examination, Duckenfield conceded that he had, indeed, 'frozen'. The inquest jury subsequently determined that the 96 were unlawfully killed by the gross negligence manslaughter of the then Chief Superintendent Duckenfield.
Myers insisted that Greaney's persistent questioning was unfair and that he was 'bombarded with questions for days'. Which is not how it seemed at Warrington. There was no chance to challenge Duckenfield's version of events because he did not testify, though judge Sir Peter Openshaw told the jury they should not read anything malign into that.
Openshaw advised that 'the lie' was also irrelevant to their considerations and that it was 'not in the least surprising' during the frenetic chaos of the moment. Those words will haunt many of the bereaved relatives until the end of their days.
The judge pointed the jury to assertions Myers made about Liverpool fans' behaviour, of which there is no known evidence, despite the exhaustive HIP report.
He said there were many more Liverpool supporters who wanted tickets and 'this fuelled a black market'. He told the jury to consider hooliganism of the 1980s — 'sometimes fuelled by a heady mixture of tribalism and excessive drinking'. The HIP found this utterly irrelevant to the causes of the disaster.
The jury were unaware that there were even attempts to play a video of hooliganism in the 1980s to them, though prosecution barristers successfully argued it had no place in court — not least because it did not feature Liverpool fans.
There is no way of challenging a judge's summing-up when a jury acquits. In the final reckoning, convictions for gross negligence manslaughter are notoriously difficult to secure, creating as they do a need to prove that a 'serious and obvious' risk of death was 'reasonably foreseeable'.
Many families were astonished by Duckenfield's lack of reaction as he sat in the well of the court throughout the trial. But Judge Openshaw was empathetic. 'He has a resilient, passive and expressionless external presentation which gives no indication of his state of mind,' he told the retrial jury. 'So don't draw an adverse inference against him.'
After the vindication of the HIP report and the inquest findings, Thursday felt like a reversion to the long years of evasion over Hillsborough.