AMWAT: 1876 (reprise)

I got a bit carried away moidering about my first 1876 game for the website interview I did. Rightly, I was asked to do something less... moidery. So I did. Here's the original answer, though, which puts some meat on the bones. Chomp chomp, mmmm moidering.

My first 1876 game was FC United, away. It was the first time in two years or so that I actually woke up with butterflies in my stomach. It was a feeling that I'd missed; a feeling that had been ripped from me, to be precise. It had been a horrendous time: no football, rootless, a part of me atrophying and feeble.

I was nervous, excited, apprehensive, disturbed by myriad thoughts: what if this wasn't it? What if this was going to be the same soulless, asinine crud that had been foisted on us of late? I didn't want to go, maybe. But I had to. A lift with the legendary Mike from Citizens' Choice, and off we drove to Manchester - where City had played so often. It was a kind of squaring of the circle I didn't know existed. I'd thought it was all over. But it wasn't, now.

All doubts were erased as soon as we got in that brilliant stadium built by FCUM. Moiderers, everywhere. Moiderers from Nantporth. Of course. Those that'd stayed til the bitter, bitter end times. Those that'd severed their link earlier and kept their sanity. And, beautifully, moiderers from Farrar Road. From the NPL days. Moiderers that had lost ... not faith, that's not the right word. Lost direction, maybe. Parted with the club for whatever reason along the way: maybe the leaving of the NPL in the first place 20 years ago.

Far from fairweather fans, too: these were programme editors, turnstile operators, tote sellers of the past. And now, decades of barren Saturdays later, they were back in the fold. The booze crew. The food crew. Greyer, maybe: we all were. But eyes shining with the sense that something was happening that was right. Righteous, even. A footy pie in one hand. A beer in the other. 

And I realised then exactly what it was that had been stolen away.

Football isn't a game, not really. 

What happens on the pitch is not actually important.

Well, it is, but it's not everything.

Winning games is nice and all.

But having a community, a family, a place to be, where the moidering flows freely and the songs make you laugh and you see people for the first time in 20 years and you pick up a conversation you never ended because there was a penalty at Farrar Road and you got distracted.

FCUM showed us what was possible. The welcome was incredible. The people, fantastic. The passion shared.

This was it. 

And we'd made it, ourselves. Those days and weeks and months and years of being isolated, feeling broken and bruised and alone: this was our burden and we turned it around. Anger, Bangor, is an energy. 

And the questions raged:

Who owns a club? 

What is a club?

The answer was simple.

It is the feeling you get when you are with your comrades, twelve nil down. The chanting, the encouragement to the players, the shared sense of dread, fear, acceptance, pride and belonging.

And most of all - the utter joy when a 17-year-old Benn Lundstram squeaks home your first ever goal. That moment - magnesium flares of emotion. The most beautiful goal there has ever been.

I will never, ever forget that moment; the day we got our club back. All those thousands of games at Farrar Road, at Nantporth, and away all over Wales and England; all those tears and disappointments and weird boardroom shenanigans, all the hours of crush barrier erecting, pre-season ground painting, programme editing, bad pies, great pies, tinned mystery meat burgers.

All of that, in the minds and memories of the fans: all that was encompassed in that one moment. The culmination of hundreds of hours of work behind the scenes by those who made this happen. The end of a nightmare and the continuation of Bangor's footballing dreams. 

Holy moly.