By last Friday, four days after the great and game-changing event, the scarf has been removed from the statue of Sir Harold Wilson, outside Huddersfield railway station.

Since the scarf was blue and old Gannex man wasn’t, it’s probably just as well.

It’s true that the church bells are ringing, but that could simply be for me and my girl. Huddersfield, in truth, appears to be nursing a heavy woollen hangover.

It’s not a town I know well, the only previous journalistic forays to interview Colin Grainger and Len White, legends of Sunderland and Newcastle United respectively and of whom more shortly.

It would thus be good to boast that I’ve come to Huddersfield to acknowledge play-off promotion, to toast the improbable fact that – next season – the Terriers will be the only Yorkshire team in the Premier League.

It wouldn’t really be true. The real reason is to have a pint in the Slubbers Arms.

A slubber was a textile worker, someone who drew out and twisted fibres in preparation for spinning. The matter arose a few months back, and slowly has unravelled.

Behind the goal at South Shields was a banner from the Trimmers Arms, a trimmer being the poor guy in the hold of a coal ship paid not very much to level the load as it crashed about his cranium

Others recalled the almost extinct occupations represented by the Moulders Arms at Birtley, the Farrers at Crook, the Horsebreakers near Thirsk and by a faithful few Miners.

Better yet, someone remembered the 2011 story of Slubbing Billy, a morris dancing side who’d jungle-jangled into the Swan and Three Cygnets in Durham – seeking nothing more than refreshment – and been shown the door because of Sam Smith’s no-music policy.

The column proposed the brewery be awarded the no-bells peace prize. I was quite proud of that.

Back in Huddersfield there’s a problem, however. It’s barely noon and the website says that the Slubbers doesn’t open until three.

Sir John Betjamin reckoned Huddersfield’s the most splendid station façade in England, until he remembered St Pancras and made Huddersfield runner-up. They didn’t have play-offs in those days.

Someone else supposed it a stately home with trains. Mr Nigel Brierley, our native guide last Friday, not only suggests that it may be the only stately station with a cat flap but adds that the cat is called Felix. Then again, aren’t they all.

Nigel’s good with useless information. A music machine somewhere plays the Monkees: the singer Michael Naismith’s mum, insists Nigel, was the woman who invented Tippex. It’s the sort of thing you don’t want to check, for fear of truth’s erasure.

St George’s Square, where stands Sir Harold, also housed the hotel where Rugby League was invented and was the hub of the promotion parade which a week back Tuesday had celebrated Town’s return to top flight football for the first time since 1972 – the first side to achieve it with a negative goal difference.

Perhaps to emphasise the size of the achievement, the Daily Mail called it a small town. Most of the 165,000 population seemed to have turned out to underline their error.

Chiefly they credit David Wagner, the German manager, and chairman and local lad Dean Hoyle, 50, who opened his first Card Factory shop in 1997 and 13 years later sold the chain of 500-odd for a reputed £350m.

Hoyle still plays the Tyke, telling last Friday’s Huddersfield Examiner that the club will continue to play it tight, to be careful with the brass. Right now, they love him. For the card king, congratulations are in order.

So we have a beer in The Grove – a lovely, quirky pub – instead. On the wall, 11 rules of the house include: “Please do not pollute our pub with e-cigs, vaping devices and big farts. We have an outside area for those.”

Another states that they only use sparklers on November 5. Real ale men will understand.

Thence to the Rat and Ratchet, past a takeaway called the China Star. “It’s an anagram of anarchist,” says Nigel.

The town centre which Friedrich Engels (no less) supposed Yorkshire’s most handsome is oddly empty, the pubs likewise. It’s as if the Terriers hadn’t been promoted to the Premiership but relegated to the Huddersfield Sunday League (in which Len White played until he was 47.)

The mills are long gone, the university now Huddersfield’s biggest employer. Premier passions, it’s hoped, will stir the economy, too.

In the Sportsman, just enough customers for a game of pairs, there’s curried goat pie (and mushy peas) before finally heading to the Slubbers, accurately described on a bibulous website as a “timeless gem.”

No one else is in, Nigel further disappointed that the piano’s under lock and key. His dad was organist at Huddersfield parish church and’s pretty proficient, too. Might there even have been a Huddersfield Town song, save for Woof Woof Terriers?

The barmaid’s welcoming but not greatly helpful, says that there were probably a few in after the Wembley shoot-out. “I don’t really know, to be honest, I went to Scarborough instead.”

Colin Grainger and Len White were West Yorkshiremen with much in common, not least that they were a delight to interview. Colin, however, remains the only man to have played football for England and to have sung at the London Palladium.

By singing he could earn more in a night than the Bank of England club paid him in a week, appearing with many of the day’s big names and particularly remembered for a double bill with the immortal Bobby Thompson at various Empire Theatres.

At Sunderland they broke box office records; in Glasgow the Waster was paid off after one night. “I don’t suppose they could understand a word,” said Colin, “and probably vice-versa.”

The left winger joined Sunderland from Sheffield United in 1957, the £23,000 fee just £2,000 short of Jackie Sewell’s British record. He’d scored twice on his England debut, a 4-2 win over Brazil in which England still missed two penalties, and made a further six appearances.

He left Roker “on principle” after three-and-a-half years – “Allan Brown (the manager) was a funny man, you know” – played on, scouted, sang for his supper, made a CD when he was 70. “You can hear the words, that’s the secret. Not all this bang-bang-bang all the time,” said Colin.

Still singing, he will be 84 on Saturday.

I’d interviewed Len White in February 1993 – “as modest and as charming a man as ever kicked a caser.”

He was, he said, winning a battle with stomach cancer. “They said it were an ulcer at first, but I knew it were something worse.”

He spent nine-and-a-half years at St James’ Park, scored 142 league goals. “It weren’t that I were anything special,” he’d insisted. “I had George Eastham on one side, Ivor Alchurch on the other. I couldn’t go wrong, really.”

He’d also hit an eight-minute hat trick for the Football League, but never made the full England team. “It never entered my head,” said Len. “There were good professionals ahead of me.”

His Newcastle career was effectively ended by a two-footed tackle from Dave Mackay. “In his book he said it were an accident,” said Len, “but you don’t have accidents with two feet from behind.”

In 1993 he was 62, a dye works weighbridgeman. He died the following year. Hoe he’d have loved last week in Huddersfield.