This week the show stops on a single word: heroes — the ones who step forward. And the thing about heroes at this club, Danny and Sarah find, is that they come in two completely different shapes.

In 1986/87 it's Keith Houchen: a journeyman out of Hartlepool by way of Orient, York and Scunthorpe, who'd already had his FA Cup moment (a penalty against Arsenal for York in January 1985) and arrived at Highfield Road in the summer of '86 almost unnoticed. Seven goals in fifty-four Coventry appearances — two of them, Old Trafford in the fourth round and Hillsborough in the semi, among the most important the club has ever had. The third is a diving header the show is deliberately not naming yet.

In 2016/17 it's Gael Bigirimana — Bigi — born in Burundi, brought to England as a refugee child, a Coventry academy product who'd gone to Newcastle, the Premier League and Europe and come home. By the trophy season he was a senior man in a side sitting 23rd in League One. On the 2nd of April 2017, eleventh minute, 74,443 inside Wembley, he reacted first to a loose ball and put Coventry ahead in the EFL Trophy Final. Then, like Houchen, he was gone by the summer.

Two players who landed, scored the thing that outlives them, and left before a normal career could grow over the moment. Danny calls it the visitor and the wall — and the wall, this week, is Cyrille Regis: the load-bearing presence Houchen's header quietly depends on, the man the club spent the next thirty years trying to replace. Around him, the players the building actually remembers because they stayed long enough to be remembered — Trevor Peake (Nuneaton-born, 277 games) and Steve Ogrisovic (507 appearances, sixteen years, a goalkeeper who became architecture) — and their 2017 echo in Jordan Willis, a Coventry-born centre-back who scored three times in a relegation season.

Underneath it all, the semi-final nobody talks about: Hillsborough, the 12th of April 1987, Coventry 3 Leeds 2 after extra time, fifty-one thousand in the ground, Houchen ahead and Dave Bennett the extra-time winner. No semi, no final.

The 2017 thread carries its own weight: the trophy on the 2nd of April, the Charlton draw that confirmed relegation on the 14th — twelve days later — and the supporters who said not "we earned this" but "we needed this." Sarah brings a half-remembered John Sillett line about going up the Wembley steps — paraphrased, because the exact wording won't pin to one source — and both hosts finally agree to read what's in David's notebooks.

Next episode: the league reality — relegation in 2017, tenth place in 1987, and what each of those numbers does to the meaning of a trophy. Then, in Episode 7, both Wembleys, side by side.

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Sources: The Guardian archive, Wikipedia, and Perplexity AI. Hosted on Microsoft Azure; AI pipeline supported by the Google Founder Program. Show notes, transcripts and the full episode archive at skybluetimemachine.com.