Football was left feeling very much like just a game on Tuesday 26th April, when a jury, having spent two years in a makeshift courtroom in Warrington hearing evidence, both factual and fictional, much of it deeply harrowing, deeply upsetting, deeply disturbing, found that the ninety-six people that died at Hillsborough on 15th April 1989 had been unlawfully killed.
I suspect that I am not alone in having, over the years, grown weary, not of, but by, the Hillsborough story, succumbing to a kind of Hillsborough-fatigue, emotionally saturated by tales too grim to bear, the reflected pain of others too much to take, unable - or perhaps unwilling - to deal with the overwhelming sense of powerlessness it made me feel. Like anyone else, I had my own everyday stuff going on, my own problems and worries, my own life to live.
Pathetic, I know.
Thank goodness the families of the ninety-six never gave in to such fear. Thank goodness they never gave in to despair or took refuge in denial. Thank goodness they, the ones that survived to see that momentous day, were never broken by the huge weight pressing down on them and attempting, with all its might, to destroy them. Thank goodness they never gave up.
For, goodness knows, most would have done.
It was on a train journey to Manchester on that Tuesday when it all hit home for me, in all its shocking, unfathomable, frightening magnitude. As the news of the victims' families long-awaited victory - if we can really call it that - broke, so the wall I had subconsciously erected around myself for years, to shield myself from a story too bleak to comprehend, crumbled, and all the unbelievable horror finally sunk in.
There I sat, reading a long, horrifying, magnificent article by David Conn, who has spent two decades covering the Hillsborough story in all its tragic detail. And there, in a crowded carriage, I cried.
In truth, almost every word, every line, delivered a crushing blow, such was its bleak power. The part that struck me most profoundly, however, was the poignant tale of the father who, being crushed to death at a football match, was last heard saying "My son, my son."
Two such simple words, yet ferociously moving in their beautiful, heartbreaking, human simplicity. A man, knowing his own end was nigh, and suffering untold agony, sending up a desperate, pleading prayer, the survival of his son, whom he had brought into this world and loved and nurtured and cherished, his final and all-consuming wish, even as he, himself, was gasping his final, tortured breath, and hoping against hope that his boy would somehow escape with his life.
His prayer, it turned out, went unanswered and his son, too, died, in the same hellish manner in which he, through no fault of his own, met his end.
Reading those words - "My son, my son" - on that train, it was impossible not to think of my own little boy and the times I've taken him to Old Trafford. Kissing goodbye to my wife - his mum - and my daughter - his sister - "Love you. See you later..." Much, I suppose, as those ninety-six poor souls would have done that day, never suspecting that those goodbyes would be their last.
You may ask what gives me, a Manchester United fan, the right to comment on any of this.
Yet, this is a story that goes way beyond football rivalry, that goes way beyond football. It should make every fan of every football club, and everyone beyond, seethe with rage against the machine that spent over a quarter of a century trying to grind those it perceived as weak and defenceless into submission.
They had only the love in their hearts for those they had lost, and their desperate desire to see their coldly, calculatedly besmirched reputations restored, to give them strength. That, it turns out, was more powerful than the might of a whole establishment - from an entire police force, to the most powerful and influential newspaper in the land, and even the government itself - all of them seemingly hell-bent on burying the truth that they are meant to uphold, in a chillingly detached attempt to protect themselves.
I don't know that I could cope with opening my eyes each morning for twenty-seven years and, in that moment when sleep's forgetfulness flits away and is replaced by the reality of wakefulness, remember the all-too familiar heartache, the dawning of another day groping in the darkness for the justice that would have been theirs long ago were it not for the wretchedness and cowardice and profound, self-serving cruelty of the people at the head of a system that was meant to protect and serve, but instead trampled and betrayed.
Forget about football rivalry. Forget about club allegiance. Forget about trophies and titles and records. Forget about football. For all of that pales into insignificance in the face of tragedy such as that seen that day at Hillsborough, and the courage and dignity such as that seen since.
Bill Shankly once said that football is more important than life and death. But we all know, just as Shankly did, that it really isn't. It's just a game.
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