Snooker and the Crucible renewing their vows was a love story that warmed hearts aplenty and felt like a rare dose of romance in an often sterile sporting landscape.
The World Snooker Championship has been held at the Sheffield theatre since 1977 but there appeared to be a very real chance that it would make a move after the 2027 event.
The contract was coming to an end and Matchroom president Barry Hearn was happy to play the pantomime villain for snooker fans, making it clear that unless Sheffield City Council significantly sweetened the deal, the relationship was coming to an end.
The sweetener Hearn was after was a bigger venue than the Crucible, which seats fewer than 1,000 people when snooker’s biggest stars scrap it out for the richest prize in the game.
By anyone’s reckoning that is a small number for a sport’s showpiece event, especially as the Masters at Alexandra Palace welcomes over 2,000 fans in for each session every January.
The wily old promoter painted a bleak picture for Sheffield, demanding something that seemed unfeasible, but somehow he got what he was after.
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Politicians, including the PM, found the cause to save the Crucible alluring enough that they found £35m down the back of the sofa and funded a refurb and rejig that will see 500 more seats squeezed in, making it a theatre in the round.
A future uncertain is now secured until at least 2045 with a new deal signed and, barring a year or two away while renovations are carried out, the World Snooker Championship remains at its spiritual home.
It is a good deal for World Snooker Tour, getting an expensively improved venue at no cost to themselves, but it also felt like a welcome result for romance and history over cold hard cash.
Hearn had been happy to talk up the possibility of the World Snooker Championship setting sail for the Middle East, taking an eye-watering site fee to play for a giant top prize.
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The money sounded great to the players, but the prospect of playing in a soulless venue in front of tiny, often disinterested crowds did not sound good to the cueists or snooker fans alike.
As we have seen in boxing in recent years, you can put the biggest names in the biggest fights in Saudi Arabia, but money cannot buy atmosphere, it seems.
The Crucible atmosphere is famously unique for a snooker tournament, creating an intense pressure on the players in the confined surroundings.
Whether it had been Riyadh or Beijing or even London, a much bigger arena would surely have lost that and one of the World Championship’s great strengths would have been sold. It would not have been worth the money.
Instead snooker’s greatest tournament will continue to be played in the same room it has for nearly 50 years, where countless iconic moments have taken place.
The world changed dramatically between John Spencer beating Cliff Thorburn in 1977 and Zhao Xintong downing Mark Williams in 2025, but that room has not altered much at all.
It has been the setting for Alex Higgins heroics, Steve Davis dominance, Jimmy White heartache, Stephen Hendry supremacy, Ronnie O’Sullivan wizardry and Mark Selby granite.
That space was also the host of Dominic Dale vs David Gray in the second round of the 2000 World Championship. A perhaps forgettable contest which the Spaceman won 13-1.
It was not forgettable for this writer, though, as it was his first ever visit to the Crucible as a slightly disappointed 11-year-old who expected to see Ronnie O’Sullivan vs Peter Ebdon before their surprise defeats to Gray and Dale.
There was no disappointment about the experience of the place, though, as I sat alongside my dad who had been there for the first time himself in 1979, watching Steve Davis’ debut against Dennis Taylor.
Everything has happened right there and will continue to. Now there is every chance that the next generation will experience the same and my one-year-old son can sit beside his dad and grandad in that same room one day.
This is one family from South Yorkshire, but there will be similar tales from many, many more from across the country and around the world.
This is hopelessly sappy, I understand that, but just occasionally it is nice to remind yourself that sport is about that as well, not just the money.