My Experience: I watch heartbreak and heroics in shattering finale of Harrogate Town's relegation battle

Instead, all of us are getting to our feet to applaud Harrogate Town as manager Simon Weaver and his players repay the compliment while they leave the pitch for the final time as an English Football League club.

Beaten warriors with a look of sadness in their eyes and the flickering thought of what might have been.

Four hours earlier the same fans had begun pouring across the Stray from the direction of the town centre well before kick-off time against visitors Barnet.

The slow trickle across the glorious expanse of green grass gradually turns into a river of Harrogate Town supporters in the bright sunshine.

The poshest walk to a match anywhere in professional football.

This is the fixture that counts, the season distilled into 90 minutes.

Second bottom versus ninth top.

Once inside this unusually small but most family-friendly of grounds, there's a carnival atmosphere despite the elephant in the room of possible relegation from EFL Division 2.

If anyone sporting Harrogate Town's traditional yellow and black colours is talking about "going down" it is being said in the quietest of whispers.

But I do notice some fans are already checking their phones for other results on the final day of the season before a single ball has even been kicked.

Hopes and permutations.

If Town lose they are down.

If they win and any one of their three rivals in this tense relegation battle loses they stay up.

If they draw and Crawley or Tranmere draw, they are down.

If they draw and Newport County draw they will remain in elite football on goal difference.

Typically, Harrogate Town get off to a bright start before giving away a soft goal through a defensive blunder after only five minutes.

There are audible groans amid the crowd of nearly 4,000 people packed into this old skool ground, only 400 of them travelling fans.

No one is entirely surprised at this turn of events.

Ten wins out of 45 league games in the build-up to this crucial encounter tells its own story in a season where Harrogate Town appear to have lost the art of turning performances into results.

The street-wise Barnet are a strong team but, for all Harrogate Town’s problems this season, there has been much to admire in their football and the underdogs do not lie down.

In fact, the more the minutes tick away, the better Town get.

Soon it is the big boys who look under threat.

In the 29th minute Harrogate Town deservedly level the scores from the penalty spot.

By the second half they are on well on top, carving out goal opportunity after goal opportunity.

Just one more push and the game is theirs.

With Newport still 1-0 down to bottom placed Barrow and their fellow relegation rivals both drawing so far, the crowd are willing Harrogate Town on under the glare of a cloudless sky.

Behind me I can hear groups of young children chanting "we're staying up" in squeaky voices.

The appetite to pull off a minor miracle is almost palpable inside the Exercise Stadium.

The dream of success chairman Irving Weaver and his son Simon Weaver, the manager, first brought to the club in 2009, an eternity ago in football terms, has now become the dream of thousands of people in a place never previously know for being a 'football town'.

There's only just over ten minutes of normal time left when the balloon bursts.

News comes in that Newport County have equalised at Barrow in the 76th minute.

Then, in the 82nd minute, Barnet bring on a towering substitute.

Almost inevitably, just seconds later, he buries the ball in the back of the net with his first touch of the ball.

One minute later, Newport take the lead at Barrow.

For the first time since the match began Harrogate Town fans go deadly quiet – even the ones at the usually noisier Hospital End of the ground, the only part of the Exercise Stadium in any way akin to going to Elland Road.

Now the tone is being set by the small number of away fans, as it has been so often at Wetherby Road, which, despite Town's truly remarkable rise up the divisions under the Weavers, has rarely, if ever, been described as a "fortress".

Still, Harrogate Town refuse to surrender.

The tough and, perhaps, cynical culture of the EFL may be a hard place to play nice football in but playing nice football is what Harrogate Town do and they do it to the very end.

As if sensing the collective will inside the ground, the referee who, like many of the men in black who have come to officiate at Wetherby Road, has scarcely been generous to the home side, does his best to keep the dream alive by conjuring up eight minutes of injury time like a rabbit out of a hat.

Chances come then go, then come and go again in what has turned into a magnificent but doomed finale.

The whistle blows with Town still looking to attack but still failing to put the ball in the net.

It's been a heroic effort by the men in yellow and black, some of whom have fallen to their knees on the rich grass of Wetherby Road.

But the team has simply run of road and time.

Afterwards, as deflated fans make their way back home across the Stray, I retreat to the sanctuary of Harrogate Town's hospitality suite to mingle with players and club officials.

There are a lot of disconsolate people there, the wind taken out of their sails.

It feels like a wake but beneath the obvious disappointment it's possible to discern a sense of lingering pride in everyone involved with this special club, a quiet determination to go again.

Harrogate Town have flown so far and high in the last ten years, a tiny club shooting for the moon.

With this sort of spirit, their time will surely come again in the upper echelons of the sport.

Harrogate Town's chairman and owner Irving Weaver, the man who engineered the club’s transformation, tells me that, if the season had started at the end of January, the results since then would have meant that Harrogate ended the season in the top half of the division rather falling back into the non-professional ranks.

It's a fan's way of thinking, I suppose, but he's not wrong.

What ifs and should have beens and could have beens don't win games. But that's the glory of football, the glory of Harrogate Town.