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Late afternoon, Tuesday, 28 May 2002. A cortege of black London cabs snakes its way across the capital from the FA's headquarters in Soho Square to the Fox and Grapes pub on Wimbledon Common.
The despondent passengers, all fans of Wimbledon, have just learnt that their long campaign to prevent their club being relocated to Milton Keynes has ended in defeat.
In funereal gloom they enter the boozer, where legend has it that Bobby Gould sent his players, armed with a few quid, for some pre-match bonding before the 1988 FA Cup final.
It was then, of course, that Wimbledon, who had enjoyed a meteoric rise to the top division, famously beat Liverpool 1-0 at Wembley.
But back to 2002. Drink is taken. Sorrows are drowned. Bodies fall. One fan, Marc Jones, pulls people up, literally from the floor, telling them: "Enough of this, we start again." A light flicks on in the head of another driving force in the anti-move campaign, Kris Stewart.
Two nights later, Stewart will stand up at the AGM of the Wimbledon Independent Supporters' Association - held at the local community centre, which is barely able to cope with the 1000 souls who turn up - and he says: "I'll hate these people who've done this to our club until the day I die. But now all I want to do is watch football."
AFC Wimbledon is born.
LATE AFTERNOON, Saturday, 14 February 2009. Yet another win for AFC Wimbledon, a 3-2 victory over Bath City, for a sixth success on the bounce in the Blue Square South.
The gate was 3043, just shy of AFC's average this season of 3058 but still far more than double the average of the next best club, Chelmsford City, on 1386.
When AFC played Chelmsford on January 31, the crowd at AFC's Kingsmeadow ground was 4690, or capacity. Astonishingly in these straitened times, 300 other supporters had to be locked out. AFC Wimbledon are six points clear at the top of the table, and favourites for automatic promotion to the Blue Square Premier, formerly the Conference. In other words, they are one fancied promotion away from one promotion to the Football League. A club that died is not just reborn but alive and kicking and hoping to rekindle memories of an earlier march up the pyramid.
In 1988, Wimbledon against Oxford United was a game in England's top division. Wimbledon versus Luton in the elite was even more recent, in 1991. In 2009, both those fixtures could become matches in the Blue Square Premier.
Football can make fools of us all but so too can it make heroes, as AFC's extraordinary story illustrates.
"The fact that we could be facing Oxford or Luton next season is, quite frankly, nuts," says Kris Stewart, 42, whose rallying cry on that May evening seven years ago led to him becoming AFC Wimbledon's founding chairman.
At the time, Stewart, a management accountant by trade, had just been made redundant, so he had some spare time to devote to the cause. He was far from alone in that; Wimbledon's move to Milton Keynes had made pariahs of most of the figures associated with the relocation.
It remains easy to see why. Wimbledon's former owner, Sam Hammam, had sold the club's ground, Plough Lane, in the early '90s for personal profit, making the club homeless.
Hammam had ridiculous notions of moving the club to Dublin, then sold that idea, and the club, to Norwegian businessmen who inevitably failed to relocate to Ireland.
Instead, with an ailing, failing, homeless club, they argued survival depended on moving to Milton Keynes as part of a venture involving the pop impresario Pete Winkelman. An FA Commission ultimately granted permission.
Thus the MK Dons were born, although the actual move and name change were not completed until 2004. By that time, AFC Wimbledon were up and running.
While crowds at Wimbledon matches at Selhurst Park in the Football League had hit record lows, AFC Wimbledon were on the way up.
Stewart felt very early on that the new club had a future. "We thought we'd need 20,000 to get to the end of that first season, so when we raised 85,000 in the first 10 days in 2002 I thought, 'This is going to work'."
AFC Wimbledon's first match, a friendly with Sutton, provided more evidence. Kick-off was delayed twice because this pre-season knockabout between two non-league clubs attracted so many people.
Their first competitive match was in August 2002, when they set out in their inaugural season in the Combined Counties League, which is in the ninth tier of the football pyramid.
In their second season, 2003-04, they won promotion to the Isthmian League First Division, and then went straight up again to the Premier level in the same league before going up to the Blue Square South in 2008. Their prolific form of late suggests that they can dash straight to the BSP.
Their attendances - the 87th best in England - are already at Football League levels, let alone Conference. They attract more fans than nine League Two sides, including Rochdale, Darlington and Bury.
Yet there also remains a strong sense of the origins of the club, with its roots in the community, and in the righting of a perceived wrong. Niall Couper, author of The Spirit of Wimbledon and among those who attended a 14-day vigil at Soho Square in 2002 as fans awaited the Commission verdict, speaks passionately of AFC Wimbledon as "a beacon of morality" and "a reaction to what the Premier League has become".
Erik Samuelson, the club's chief executive whose position and work is scrutinised by a fan-based, democratically elected board, says the ethos of the club is about "decent, modest, unassuming people, wanting to regain our league place which was stolen".
Samuelson now oversees a club with a turnover of around 1.3m per year - huge compared to its rivals. The club has bought and developed Kingsmeadow, and total owings of around 1m - to the banks and fans - are comfortably serviceable. Interest is paid from operating profits while capital is covered by fund-raising. AFC Wimbledon is a club determined to live within its means as it looks to the future, while not forgetting the past.
Kris Stewart says his feelings of any sort towards MK Dons are "less and less" as time goes by, but he admits to being cheered by their defeats. "The fact that they still use our name, the Dons, annoys me," he says. "It shows them up for the ridiculous franchise they are. They could win the European Cup 20 years in a row but they'd still be wrong and we'd still be right."
- INDEPENDENT
