Rochdale will never know another day like this ...Middle East

Boreham Wood 2-2 Rochdale (Rush 22′, Abdulmalik 69′ | Smith 78′, Dieseruvwe 90’+7) – Rochdale win 3-1 on penalties

WEMBLEY — In Wembley Stadium, a young child stands holding his mum’s hand. He is wearing a blue-and-white shirt and is simply shouting the word “Please” over and over again. He can watch Rochdale play for another 80 years, if he’s lucky, and it’s all downhill from here. Rochdale are back in the Football League. At some point in his 30s, that lad will work out how. Let us know.

Thirty seconds later and the urges have worked. Ian Henderson is Rochdale’s record goalscorer, older than Wayne Rooney and ready to take a penalty. His services aren’t required. Instead he stands on the top of an advertising hoarding as half a northern town calls him their king.

Of course it was penalties – it could never be anything else. Rochdale were so intertwined with despair and glory, one naturally following the other and back on a mad loop. They could only be pulled apart when all other options had been exhausted. It had to lurch one way.

There is Greenwich Mean Time. There is British Summer Time. There are lines of longitude that run up and down this planet. And then there is Rochdale time. This football club has rewritten the rules on quite how much nonsense you can fit into the dying embers of football matches.

ROCHDALE HAVE DONE IT!THEY'RE PROMOTED TO THE EFL pic.twitter.com/YsZ5xOCvcN

The basic figures, as if that does any of this justice: Rochdale have scored injury-time goals in their last five matches of the season, all three turned the promotion race on its head and one of them caused a pitch invasion and wasn’t even the final goal of the game. The “You couldn’t script it” principle is sport’s most overused cliche, but this one does feel a little too much.

Mani Dieseruvwe is the shark-jumper in chief. Ninety-six minutes were up, just like at Spotland against York City. Two headers from him, ludicrously composed given the circumstances. Two extraordinary reactions, sucking the air out of the lungs of half a stadium and provoking wild screams from the other. What power it is to conduct happiness and despair like this.

A word for Boreham Wood, inadvertent joint protagonists in this great chaos. They were the dominant team almost throughout at Wembley. Abdul Abdulmalik was the best player at Wembley by such a distance that they might as well have given him his own ball to let everyone else have a go. He will surely be in the EFL next season.

Luke Garrard has done wonders here and could barely hold back the tears as he wandered the pitch forlornly watching someone else’s party. He left because he was weary and he returned to take Boreham Wood to the very border of their promised land. You control everything and you pray that fate doesn’t kick you. Garrard will be bruised but should be proud.

But history is written by the victors and Rochdale deserve it because they made it – nothing else counts. The psychological wound of the regular season’s final day could have broken them – still they came back for more.

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Rochdale went toe-to-toe with York City until the final seconds and missed out. They stormed their own pitch to celebrate an automatic promotion that never quite came. They travelled down the country and back to Wembley and almost ended where they started, a National League club. And still they found reserves of strength when everyone else had given up on them.

Fatalism doesn’t exist. Karma is nothing in sport. But Rochdale have been to the depths and stared their own extinction in the face. They have fought when the tide should have dragged them under, on and off the pitch. They are back in the Football League.

Football’s great truth is that you risk the worst day or your year for a shot at the best. For the last fortnight, Rochdale have known that more than any other club in any land you care to pick. And still they were the last ones smiling. It may get even better than this, some other day. But it will never feel the same.

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