If you’d told me in August that one of my happiest moments of the next year would be dancing with an OAP in the driving rain of South Yorkshire I would have given you the shortest of shrift, writes Simon Smith.

Some nights make you grateful, if not blessed, to be a football fan.

I have always replied to those non-believers in football who roll out that most tiresome of whines ‘22 grown men chasing a bag of wind’ with either a hard-faced three-word gesture or, if I’m in a good mood, the winning statement that should you go to watch Justin Bieber or Beyoncé or whoever, you know what you will hear and it will be all done reasonably competently.

Watch Rovers and, as Forrest Gump should have said: ‘You’re never sure what you are gonna get.’

The sheer thrill of the outcome in football is more addictive than toast.

It’s a blank canvas that is always filled after 90-odd minutes. Sometimes with a grey childish scrawl signed OC, but it is always different, and in many, often surprising, ways.

This season we have seen Tony Mowbray and his staff at Ewood working with a different palette and his squad have given us a riot of colour.

We have deserved it, after all the murk of the last few years.

It is beyond argument that we go back to the Championship in excellent shape.

These boys are used to winning and defied my prediction that they would creak over the line by producing one and a half tremendous performances in the last week.

And Mowbray has taken us up with dignity and class, unlike some managers who spoil for a fight and have shown themselves to be as graceful as a hippo on ice-skates.

The title is still up for grabs. The future is unwritten but it is brighter for us and, even while dancing in the dark Doncaster drizzle, I felt infused with sunshine and I am determined to enjoy it while it lasts.

It’s been emotional. But we wouldn’t have it any other way would we?