What we have once enjoyed we can never lose.

And so, by definition, Diogo Jota will live with me forever.

Our candle in the wind, breezing past Championship thuggery with the drop of the shoulder. Barrelling through challenges, jinking across the turf and celebrating like a schoolboy in the playing ground we call home.

I’m not sure how we get over this one. From the moment Nuno had a dream, Diogo was the player I loved most. Of course, Neves was the beacon and the brains, but Diogo was the little beauty.

Now he’s gone and I’m utterly bereft. His inexhaustible energy, his boisterous smile and his triumphant knee slides were so joyous that I’ve never quite managed to look to the future since he left in 2020. Quite how we’re all supposed to now is anyone’s guess.

For all the sickly platitudes about the need to look forward in life, I’m still yet to be convinced. Far more comforting to look back to happier times, the like of which I’m not sure we’ll see at Molineux for a while. Diogo Jota typified that passage of life like no other (to me at least). When it comes to the past, at least you know what you’ll get. Life will always feel better there and Diogo embodied why. Good could prevail, hope could spring eternal and nothing could ever feel impossible. Please take me back there, and let me take my seat.

Forty-four goals sounds particularly irrelevant when a life has been so tragically cut short but they’re all I have, so I’m going to treasure every one. I’ll also reminisce of a courageous kid obliterating the Championship in an effort of freakish proportion. In fact, I can think of no other player of that age (21) to adopt such a fearless approach to that hard-bitten league, which has chewed up and spat out players of much bigger stature. As was always the case with Diogo, he never took a backwards step.

He faced it all up with the effervescence of a kid in an amusement arcade. Our Pinball Wizard.

Memories of a Bolton pummelling at home – featuring a no-fear emasculation of David Clogger Wheater – will remain fresh, as were so many unplayable Premier League displays and *that* quarter final in the FA Cup. A quick-fire hat-trick against Espanyol showed he could poach like the best of them, while slaloming runs at St James’ Park and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium were the stuff of a Life of Riley soundtrack and a Trevor Brooking superlative.

None of it really matters in the grand scheme of things, but to me it has never mattered more.

“They say we only lose people when we forget them. We will never forget you, Diogo.”