AFC Wimbledon's return to Plough Lane is the feel-good story that football needs right now

Five of us sat on the wall outside the crumbling Wimbledon Community Centre back in 2002 wondering how it had quite come to this.

Days earlier, we’d seen our football club packed into the back of a lorry and its remains transported slowly 60 miles up the M1. Milton Keynes had won, they’d got the Football League place they wanted.

Our Football League place, and the first football franchise to be waved through in the English game.

Now we were perched waiting outside a building where votes were taken on local matters of urgency such as the destination of bake sale profits and funds for Christmas decorations. We didn’t really know why we were there, but word had got around just to turn up and listen.

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Little did anyone realise, the deteriorating hall was about to become the birthplace of arguably football’s greatest feel good story.

It was there when the fans decided to stop fighting and refocus. Wimbledon FC was gone and after years of battling, us fans just wanted to watch some football. It was time to let it go.

AFC Wimbledon was born, but told by the Football Association there and then that its formation “wasn’t in the wider interests of football”. That quote has been the club’s inspiration ever since.

Not that it needed a go-to line. A hastily arranged friendly with Sutton United was watched by over 5,000 people. Starting in the parks of the Combined Counties League, the records tumbled and the promotions flooded in.

It took just nine years to reclaim the Football League place which was ripped from them, but the club – owned and run by the fans – still had boxes to tick. A Wembley win against Plymouth in the League Two play-off final of 2016 took them into the same division of the now named MK Dons.

Last season, they climbed above the club which stole their identity and achieved something many thought they never would – actually beat them. A night which could turn even the most stony-hearted football fan into an old romantic, some of the game’s soul was recaptured in south west London.

But there was still a critical chapter of the story yet to be written.

One of the reasons why Wimbledon’s relocation to Milton Keynes was waved through was that there was no chance at all of a return to the town. Sharing at Selhurst Park, the club – MK’s deal broker Peter Winkelman protested – would die without him stepping in and saving the day.

His town, too lazy to grow their own club, saw a quick-fix to the area’s lack of sporting options. A plush new stadium ready and waiting, they just needed a club to fill it.

On a wet Wednesday morning this week, that theory was blown out of the water once and for all and the move to Buckinghamshire shown for what it was all along.

The (real) Dons signed an agreement allowing building work to begin on their new stadium, yards from where the original club walked out at Plough Lane until 1991. The impossible had been made possible.

The story is so spellbinding that a film about fan power and the show of supporter strength is planned over the coming years. The club, who 13 years ago were coming up against the powerhouses of Viking Greenford and Withdean 2000 following trials on Wimbledon common, are themselves pure box office.

They’ve done it all on their own, and the great thing is that still every single one of those who walk through to turnstiles are equal owners. They’ve weaved their own footballing fairytale.

Power to the people.