Was it, as some Spurs fans asked on my journey home, the greatest day of my life? Well, no, but it was the day everything changed for my club of 46 years. It’s a week since Marc and Joel went up to lift the FA Cup, and now I have my voice back here are some thoughts about Crystal Palace’s famous win. I don’t intend to cover well-trodden ground, about Deano’s handball, our amazing tifos, or even today’s open top bus parade but as the dust settles here are some observations.

The FA Cup still means a great deal

No debate, no hand-wringing. The FA Cup Final remains England’s flagship domestic match, with interest far beyond the immediate participants. On my way to Wembley, wearing my 1990 final replica shirt, I hadn’t got as far as the platforms at Colchester station without being wished good luck by complete strangers. On the journey home, fans of other clubs offered congratulations. Three days later, in central London, while I was again wearing Palace colours, a white van pulled up and the driver wound down the window. The driver yelled, ‘YOU BEAT THE F***ING W***ERS INNIT’, before screeching away. As a Palace fan it felt odd to have the limelight on our little club, even if some of the goodwill was borne from the identity of our opponents.

Less is more

In 2016 the FA decided that attendees at the FA Cup Final would like to hear from Tinie Tempah before the clubs took to the field. This year the frippery was stripped right back with Abide with me and some weird pitch covering. They still try too hard – the fans should be able to generate atmosphere organically, but they’ve moved in the right direction.

Living with football

This season has been good to South London’s football teams. Palace, Charlton and Wimbledon’s men’s teams have all won at Wembley in the last nine days, Charlton and AFCW winning promotion to the Championship and League One respectively. Bromley successfully completed their maiden campaign in League Two, and London City Lionesses, an offshoot of Millwall, have won promotion to the Women’s Super League (which, for the sake of balance, Palace have just been relegated from). But most years, most clubs win nothing. And so the joy, if and when it comes, is unbounded. I bet the fans of Palace, Charlton and Wimbledon have had a far better year than those of Arsenal, Man City and Chelsea who watched the second, third and fourth best teams in the country as determined by league position.

Maybe we will become used to being famous for having a great team. Maybe the ‘We’re the famous Crystal Palace’ merch from the club was not cringe but prophetic. Maybe we won’t implode as quickly as the ‘team of the eighties’ or the 1991 team. Whether we do or not, let’s hope we never become an entitled fanbase full of customers. Doc Brown had it right.

Keeping some perspective

I was thinking again about Chris Winter’s book Complete Biased Commentary. You almost forget that Winter is describing 53 years of his own journey of fandom. When he first attended Selhurst Park, in 1968, Palace had never appeared in the top division and were only seven years out from the Fourth Division. Winter has seen a football club known for Malcolm Allison, Terry Venables, balloons, ‘Sir’ Stevie Coppell, financial crises, bouncebackability, loudmouth owners and not winning anything at all bar the Full Members Cup in 1991 the final of which involved a legendary 4-1 win over Everton. When the club decided that we weren’t founded in 1905 but in 1861, all that meant for most of us was that there was another 45 years added to our history in which we did not win a single thing. The outpouring of emotion at Wembley last Saturday represented lifetimes experiencing frustration, hope followed by lost dawns, occasional despair (such as in 1999 and 2010 when we nearly folded) and general mediocrity. Chris Winter will have known how to handle defeat. I hope that he, and those who have journeyed so long, had a great day handling success.

Palace do decades

It isn’t as though Palace fans have been starved of excitement. Until more recently, mid-table was a weird place for Palace to live: normally we’d be challenging for promotion or fighting against relegation. But it’s easy to think of our last seventy years in terms of decades. In the 1950s, Palace were perennial Division Three South strugglers. Wartime apart, we’d been in that division since 1926, and the ’50s saw us require re-election three times, before becoming founder members of Division 4. The 1960s were a ‘decade of destiny’ as we rose through the league, arriving in Division 1. The 1970s saw us first unglamorous but successful, glamorous but unsuccessful, and then pragmatic and over-hyped. Then we nearly went bust. The 1980s saw extraordinarily bleak times with Ron Noades appointing Alan Mullery as manager before Steve Coppell started our slow renaissance. The 1990s were the yo-yo years: two promotions and three relegations (one on 49 points and one with us fourth from bottom). The 2000s were bookended by administrations, and will be remembered for Simon Jordan’s stewardship. Since 2010, Steve Parish has emphasised sustainable development. We’ve been here before, but the next few years seem genuinely exciting.