Do you remember the first time?

Do you remember the first live professional football match that you ever experienced? Of course you do; Like it was yesterday, right? Well, a couple of weeks ago my 10 year old boy, called Miller, actually got to experience his first ever trip to see the mighty Spurs live. Ultimately, football is a shared experience, handed down through generations. Yesterday, I handed it down to my eldest son.

So many of life’s ‘first times’ change something within you forever. Consider those truly important life-affirming moments that indelibly stamp the label of experience upon you, within you. They’re irremovable, like your first tattoo. They elevate you to a new level of maturity that only experiencing something personally can bring, like that first kiss. They can’t be repeated, like passing your driving test. It becomes a part of you. Yesterday, Spurs became an enduring part of Miller.

Visiting your first ever professional football match has the same forging effect. Forevermore your memories are engraved with your club; you can smell the ground, taste the atmosphere and relive every detail. You’re thinking about yours right now aren’t you? It reignites something inside you like all the best and most important recollections and there’s something truly profound about watching somebody else enjoy building such a memory.

Although it’s not essential to the enjoyment of a football match, it of course helps if you support the team that you’re attending on match day. And my little boy is a chest-out, sleeps-in-his-kit, 4th-generation Spurs fan. Of a kind that immediately goes out into the back garden to try and recreate the Kane goal after watching spurs win on the telly.

But he’s only ever seen it on the telly. Imagine his reaction to watching Kane do it just a few yards in front of him?

To suggest he was giddy with excitement in the build up to the match would be an understatement. Any parents of young kids will know exactly how tricky it can be to supervise a child beside himself with anticipation. Lord knows I tried Conté-esque levels of man management in the days preceding this particular home game, (against Everton), but who can blame the little fella. This event is the 10 year old’s equivalent of a wedding day, with a lifetime of commitment already pledged, this is the arranged marriage, the triturated seal, the tied knot, the big day in which he meets his adored life partner in person for the first time – I wouldn’t have been much surprised if he’d asked to change his surname to Kane afterwards!

A father bestows his football team upon his child from the moment he slips on that first Spurs baby-grow, eventually graduating to an actual Spurs shirt as soon as they’re old enough to get out of baby-grows. You know, it’s not easy trying to force a toddler to try and sit down for 90 minutes of football long before they’ve even managed 90 minutes of Toy Story 3, but I certainly tried. His Spurs support was very much without choice, without debate, without question, without any possibility of deviation – it’s pressed upon him like it was pressed upon me by my own father, equal parts honour and burden.

It’s an honour because the Spurs story is worn upon the sleeves of generations before him. He’s fully aware of past glories, as his grandfather regularly attempts to explain what it was like to watch Gilzean head in that driven Knowles cross, or to see Hoddle lob a keeper, or from myself extolling in minute detail what it felt like when I too was a kid, watching David Seaman failing to palm away Gazza’s thunderbolt free kick. But it’s also undeniably a cruel burden because he has to watch our respective faces drop when we lose for the umpteenth consecutive away game to bitter rivals Arsenal. And yes we do our best to avoid bringing up the kind of entitled kid you see throwing a strop on Twitter when his team doesn’t win, by explaining that it’s not always Mauricio Pochettino or Antonio Conte, or Heung-Min Son and Harry Kane, but sometimes it’s Christian Gross or Jacques Santini, or Helder Postiga and Vincent Janssen. It’s a turbulent life-long commitment…although mostly as a bridesmaid.

It’s not always great, it’s not always painful either, but it’s ours, and now it’s his too.

Don’t worry, I’ll make sure he passes the pain down to his own kids in the decades to come, should he decide to join the merry-go-round that is parenthood, so it’ll be a burden he too can re-distribute when the time comes. It’s a form of family trickle-down economics. “Shit may well run downhill, but one day kid you’ll be on top of that hill”.

And so to match day. We don’t actually live in London and I often work weekends, so season tickets aren’t really an option, but we will try and attend when it’s feasible and the Everton home game seemed a fairly solid opportunity. A home game, a late kick off on a weekend, against one of the league’s established sides, but one we are likely to earn points from, especially with the visiting team’s form in recent months. No game is ideal, or a guaranteed win, but I was 100% hand-picking this motherfucking fixture in order to maximise Miller’s big day experience.

He woke me up far earlier than he’s supposed to on a Saturday, but there he was standing at the foot of my bed, posing with his hands on his hips, chin up, chest pumped out, fully decked out in his Spurs kit; The magnificent 20/21 green away outfit, socks included. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a beam of sunlight had back lit him from the window behind him, it was perfect. Match day was very much ON, although perhaps he could swap the shorts, socks and shin pads for some tracky bottoms.

As the train pulled into St Pancras, a station so large, its cavernous, airport-like busy-ness soon quietened Miller’s excited gibbering. He was in central London, the big metropolis, an often overwhelming experience for a small boy. His tiny hand now gripping mine that little bit tighter, as we slalomed over to the King’s Cross Underground, northward bound.

“It’s like ‘planet Tottenham’, almost everyone’s wearing a Spurs shirt Dad!” he observed whilst the train filled with fellow Spurs fans as we ebbed closer stop by stop. Then the experience really started to take off, as we walked from the station to the stadium, the streets filling ever more with lillywhite, and his energy picked up as he relaxed – Miller was joining his tribe for the first time and you could see him feel it.

And then there’s that moment.

In Florence, Italy, they call it ‘Stendhal Syndrome’ – a psychosomatic condition brought on when individuals become exposed to objects of great beauty and importance. Much like those who faint at the sight of the Santa Maria Del Fiore cathedral, we’ve all experienced something similar upon seeing the new Tottenham stadium for the first time. Sure, you’d have seen it get constructed, you’d have seen it on television numerous times, but nothing prepares you for that first glimpse of it on route to a match, as it initially peaks up from above the rooftops. It’s completely out of place, its scale more like an alien spaceship that’s landed here among the terraced housing, looking every bit like a stage set for world domination. It’s a behemoth, a beautiful, imposing palace, a towering cathedral of all things Spurs. And we are gathered here today to baptise Miller.

He didn’t walk so much as skip the last few hundred yards. Once there we enjoyed a lap of the outside to admire the towering architectural complex, before entering the stadium underneath the South Stand, the elevated stanchions soaring above with a Sequoia-like permanence. The gathering crowd already joined in full song, the festival atmosphere, the huddles of chatter, the positive anticipation.

Following more than a couple of beers for dad, a coca-cola or two for Miller, the sugar only serving to wash away any nervous apprehensions, we joined in with the chants he recognised. “It’s so much louder when you hear the chants in person Dad!”. “Look Dad, isn’t that Ben from We Are Tottenham TV?”. He’d almost forgotten we were here to watch a football game, such is the entertaining pantheon that is the inside social areas of the new Spurs stadium.

Block 324, row 58, seats 271 and 272. Miller was getting his first taste sitting within the South Stand. It had to be this stand, right? And so we finished our drinks and made our way up into the architecture to hunt out our seats, to the stairs where we enjoyed a rather unexpected moment together. We stood at the foot of the final few steps that went up and out into the arena. I paused, squatted down to his level, put my hand on his shoulder and asked him to walk up those final few steps alone, with instructions to do it slowly, to stand at the top as the pitch reveals itself and to take in the moment. I’d remembered just how much that initial reveal had left its impression on me as a kid. The perfect green lawn unfurls below, a pitch endowed with incredible moments, and as you raise your eyes to take in the magnificence of the thousands of fans filling your view, the moment hits, it’s actually happening. I scooped up Miller, embraced the moment as we breathed it in together.

It’s remarkable how swiftly a kid this young can adjust to such an overwhelming and intense adult arena. It also says something about how family-friendly the game has become since the 70s and 80s, whilst losing little of its magic. All ages, creeds, sexes and colours are welcomed here, ‘the people’s game’ has never been so accessible to all. Then the giant screens begin the run through of famous Spurs moments from history, as the loud, dramatic classical music blasts out, before switching gear to the strum of Metallica’s Enter Sandman and its slow-build monster riff, before the players finally jog out – it’s absolutely bloody marvellous. The stadium announcer did his thing, Miller cheering in unison with every Spurs player name that was tannoyed in the dominating echo above our heads. You’ve never seen a kid pay so much locked-on attention; these weren’t just players in the flesh running out, they were celebrities, they were the guys he’d watch score his favourite goals, they were his posters come to life, Panini stickers in 3D, they were his heroes. “COME ON YOU SPUUURS” bellowed around, Miller joining in the chorus with the rest of us.

Groups of mostly working class men singing songs together simply isn’t something a kid sees on a daily basis, but any intimidation or concern didn’t register, Miller was surrounded by people who felt just like he did, passionate about Spurs, and he was as enthralled and as caught up in it as much as they were. It’s also worth noting how the fans in the seats immediately surrounding ours were friendly and engaging with Miller throughout. We told them it was his first ever game and you could see they knew what that meant, they could see themselves reflected in Miller’s twinkling eyes.

And this is the thing. Every single passionate fan inside the ground that day has at one point experienced the same giddy ride as Miller just had. Hundreds of thousands of others have done the same over the decades, over the centuries, through generations of families and the circle continued to go around this particular weekend. Football is ultimately a show, an event, but the real event is happening in the stands. It’s in the racing heartbeats, in the chorus of voices, in the moments and in the lifelong memories, it’s all wrapped up in an experience unique to the individual fan each and every time, but shared collectively between us. The game doesn’t belong to the players, or even the owners, it belongs to the people. I know exactly how Miller felt that day, you know it too.

And like every big experience, it was over lightning quick, but yet every tiny detail had been recorded in the long term memory banks. We’d won the game 2-0 as it turns out, but ultimately and just as importantly, Miller had been won over by the club. He had a kind of glow surrounding him as we meandered out onto the concourse, the songs still ringing around. Sure, this wasn’t a cup final, this wasn’t a game with any particular significance. This wasn’t a Champions League night, or a heated derby game. This game won’t go down in the annals of history, or be discussed over future pints, but for Miller this was the one – perhaps even the most significant game he’ll ever watch. Just think about that the next time you’re at a match; No matter whether the game you’re watching is decent or dull, no matter whether you’re enjoying it or hating it, somewhere in that stand there’s a little boy experiencing his baptism. Every game matters to somebody and the circle of a life spent supporting Spurs will be doing yet another rotation.