Talk about keeping the faith.
Not even at the start of last season, but four straight defeats into it, Steve Cram – ace distance champion, BBC athletics commentator and president of the London and Southern England branch of the Sunderland Supporters’ Association – decided to have a flutter.
He did not put a fiver on when Niall Quinn might sack himself as manager, or on the identity of the man who’d replace him. He put it – and this will strike a chord with our new sponsor Boylesports – on Sunderland winning promotion. And got odds of 25-1.
The winnings paid for a decent weekend away. Steve does not say what his fellow talking head at Radio 5 Live, Mike Costello, did with his (and Mike, though not a SAFC fan, got 28-1 by shopping around).
Steve, as you might imagine, is thoroughly chuffed at the way things turned out. If you choose to read on, you will see how supporting the Lads has brought him much grief, too, entertaining as some of that grief happens to be.
I propose to leave the original article, as slightly amended by me when I posted it here, largely untouched. This is the update.
Steve kept the box he has had since Roker Park. He became gloomy, but not unduly so, in the miserable recent past, and he still admires Bob Murray for his legacy of stadium and Academy, while fully believing the time had come for a change at the top.
His dad, the retired bobby, is alive and well and is the box’s most regular user. Daughter Josephine – she would prefer me to call her Josie, I gather – and son Marcus are away at school, respectively 17 and 14 now, and both still follow the team, Josie rather more fervently than her brother.
In a school where not all her peers necessarily share her passion for football, she has persuaded an Everton-supporting head of house to make sure the common room TV is switched to Sky when Sunderland are on. She has also made Leeds her first university choice, to make trips back for games all the easier.
And Steve is buzzing about the season to come, but considers that, well as the squad did in the season just finished, Roy Keane needs to make several key acquisitions if we are to become a seriously competing top 10 sort of side.
“There are no guarantees people he brings in will perform for us as well as they have elsewhere,” he reminds us. “But Keane has such stature in the game that good players will want to come rather than having to be persuaded with the carrot of lots of money.”
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If Don Hutchison, Kevin Phillips, Lee Clark and Allan Johnston ever felt they could have done with a spot of advice on how to handle the odd jeer or two from Sunderland supporters, Joe Simpson would have been the man to turn to. He knows what it is like. 
