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As Carlisle United fans packed into Brunton Park on Sunday, excitement and expectation was high that the team would be heading to Wembley for a promotion shootout.
A solid third place in the National League had geared the side up for a play-off shot at earning an immediate return to League Two.
Over two hours of football later, the opportunity had slipped through their grasp as Mark Hughes' 10 men were beaten in extra time by Boreham Wood to the sheer disappointment of the vast majority in the 13,814-crowd.
The Cumbria club will now face successive seasons outside the EFL and it raises a stark question – does that make the efforts of the last nine months a failure?
The previous time that Carlisle went out of the EFL in 2004, they regrouped under Paul Simpson in finishing third in the Conference (as it was then called).
Crucially, they then made it to the play-off final where they defeated Stevenage to to immediately return to League Two. That was a huge success and has gone down in club folklore as such.
The aim all season has been to repeat that effort and in losing to Boreham Wood, the simple answer is that Carlisle have failed.
Since being elected into the Football League for the first time in 1928, this was only the second season that this proud football city had not been in that company but their stay in the National League will have to linger on.
- Boreham Wood beat Carlisle to reach promotion final
- Carlisle owner vows club will come back stronger
Last summer, the club was counting the cost of successive relegations from Leagues One and Two.
Carlisle were ill-prepared for the third tier in 2023-24 after a surprise promotion while the campaign in League Two was an unmitigated disaster as changes under the club's new American ownership did not work.
Mark Hughes arrived in February 2025, but the ex-Manchester United and Wales hero could not save them from relegation with the damage too great to undo by the time he took over.
Yet the veteran of 466 Premier League games as manager decided to stay for the National League campaign – his first at that level, tasked with trying to get Carlisle back up.
They collected 95 points – a club-record for a 46-game season and won 29 games, having won only 17 across the previous two seasons combined, while they kept 17 clean sheets, again more than in the two combined relegation campaigns.
For comparison in their Conference promotion season 21 years ago, Carlisle acquired 73 points from 42 games, an average of 1.73 points per game, as opposed to 2.07 this time, with 20 wins.
"We've had an outstanding season," Hughes told BBC Radio Cumbria. "The club's come a long way in the months that we've worked hard.
"It was difficult at the beginning of the season, we didn't know what was ahead of us, we didn't know whether or not we had the right personnel, the right characters.
"It was a big learning curve for a lot of people, myself included. We got close, but not close enough this time."
Slim EFL returns
Despite Carlisle's impressive points haul, their strong playing budget and the second-highest average crowds in the division to draw on, they were never in contention for the National League title.
That was first evidenced in September when they were hammered 5-0 at York City and then convincingly beaten 2-0 at home by Rochdale in the space of four days.
Those two both did the double over the Cumbrians after Christmas, while play-off conquerors Boreham Wood, who finished fourth, took four points and scored five goals in their two league meetings with Carlisle.
The nagging feeling that the Blues struggled against the better sides in the division never went away – with eight of the nine league defeats coming against sides in the top half.
However, to achieve promotion at the first attempt would have been bucking the recent trend.
Of the past 10 clubs relegated from the EFL, only one has bounced straight back – Grimsby Town in 2022. Oldham Athletic took three seasons and it will be the same for Rochdale if they beat Boreham Wood in Sunday's play-off final.
The rest are still in the National League, or lower, as will be the case for Morecambe.
Across those clubs, the average league finish is 12th with an average points tally of 62.8, so Carlisle have smashed those metrics.
'A bottleneck at the top of National League'
What is without doubt is how strong the National League has become at the top end.
The fact there is only one automatic promotion slot is forcing teams to reach exceptionally high levels. There have been three winners in the last four seasons with more than 100 points, with Chesterfield's tally of 98 two years ago the outlier.
With the promotion spots so keenly contested, many clubs have had to lick their wounds and go again after play-off near misses.
But there has been no stopping them once they have escaped the clutches of the National League, with Wrexham and Stockport County the prime examples.
"There is a bottleneck at the top of the National League," said Hughes. "Once teams are able to get out, then invariably they are very, very strong in the league above and there are very good examples of that.
"I'm sure that when we get out of this league – which we feel will only be a matter of time as long as things are done right – we will be stronger, but it's just getting out of a very difficult league when only one or two go up."
The big question now is whether Hughes is in charge for a second season in the fifth tier and trips to Fylde and Worthing.
Will he want to go again and be the man to get Carlisle back in the EFL? Or will the club decide they need to go in a different direction?
The 62-year-old was coy after the match on Sunday, but he has said that conversations will take place as to how the future looks.
He added: "I've enjoyed everything we've done as a group. The staff have been outstanding and the players have responded, so I'm grateful for that.
"The next few days will give everyone a bit of clarity I'm sure."
'The season was a crossroads for the club'
James Phillips, BBC Radio Cumbria Carlisle commentator
Success or failure in football is hard to define in the era we find ourselves in, where social media has turned everything left or right, good or bad…
What happened to nuance?
That's certainly true of the position Carlisle United find themselves in with head coach Mark Hughes, who's taken his team into the National League play-offs with a club-record points tally, picking up the whole club after two consecutive years of relegation.
But he is still considered a failure by some and a dinosaur (in footballing terms) by others.
There can be no denying United under Hughes were a long way short of the division's best two teams, York and Rochdale, along with Boreham Wood, who beat them in the play-offs and took four points off them in the league.
But these teams had built a way of playing carefully over time, signing players who fit the style and working them into the system, with patience.
Would the Carlisle fans have stomached spending two to three years in the National League building a style?
In truth, the season was a crossroads for the club, where in one direction was the pragmatic approach to winning that might yield an immediate return to the EFL
In the other, a longer path to becoming a team who played great football and eased into becoming the sort of winning machines we saw in York and Rochdale.
Which direction the club took with Hughes is clear and, in some respects, there was success. But there was also failure, in missing out on promotion.
The question now is, how do Carlisle take the time and patience required to build an attractive way of playing, when anything short of promotion is considered failure?
