Three days before pre-season, Scott Parker walked.

It is easy, five years on, to forget how chaotic the summer that started this was. Fulham had been relegated from the Premier League the month before. The squad was due back at Motspur Park in a fortnight. On 28 June 2021, Scott Parker resigned and signed for Bournemouth in the same week. Tony Khan released a statement that called the move a violation of contract. The Cottage's online reaction, fair to say, was warm in the way a frying pan is warm.

That left the club without a head coach three days before pre-season was due to start. Aleksandar Mitrović was still on the books and looking, by every available signal, like a striker who had played his last game in a relegated side and would not be sticking around for the Championship. Tom Cairney was still the captain. Antonee Robinson was a year into his Fulham career and three years away from being Player of the Season. Tosin Adarabioyo was a centre half on the upgrade. Bobby Decordova-Reid, Harry Wilson, Harrison Reed, Tim Ream, all under contract: a Premier League squad that had just been relegated, with no one to take training on Monday.

The Cottage went into July knowing two things. One: it had to get straight back up. The Championship, with its three relegation places and its richest field in years, was not a forgiving division to drift through. Two: it had to keep Mitrović from walking out. The striker had scored thirty-three goals across the previous Championship season (when Fulham went up under Parker). He had been the difference between getting up and not. He was also, at twenty-six, the kind of striker that mid-table Premier League clubs notice. There was a window for losing him before the next pre-season started. The club had to close that window faster than the manager hire happened.

1 July 2021. A three-year deal for a manager who had never stayed three years anywhere.

On 1 July 2021, Fulham announced Marco Silva as head coach on a three-year contract. He had been at Sporting Lisbon the season before. Olympiacos before that. Hull, Watford, Everton in the Premier League. The CV was a manager who had been close to a number of jobs and never quite kept one for long. Estoril for a year. Sporting for a year. Hull for half. Watford for half. Everton for eighteen months. Olympiacos for a year. He had never managed a club into a second pre-season. Fulham, in due course, would give him five.

The case for Silva, viewed from July 2021, was specific. He was forty-three, in his managerial prime, and had spent his Premier League years working with squads that were structurally similar to the one Fulham now had: not the biggest budgets, players who needed coaching out of habits rather than recruited at the top of the market, and a need to play front-foot football rather than scrape draws. Watford under him had been, briefly, very good. Everton had finished eighth in a season where Silva genuinely had them in the European race for most of it. The sacking, in December 2019, had come during a run of bad results rather than a vote of no confidence from inside. The football he played was watchable. The reputation was warmer than the win-loss record suggested.

The case against him was the short stays. Five clubs in seven years, two of them ending in sackings, none of them ending with a trophy on the table. There was a school of thought, in the Cottage commentariat at the time, that Fulham had hired a manager who was a step or two below where Watford and Everton had thought they were getting. There was another school of thought, vindicated within ten months, that hired right Silva was a strong Championship-promotion appointment and a credible Premier League stabiliser on top.

That quote sits a long way down the road from July 2021. He had no way of knowing, when he signed the three-year deal, that he would be sitting in a press room four and a half years later saying the longer line about consistency and the project. He had been the manager who never stayed three years. Fulham would change that.

Mitrović stayed. And then he was rebuilt around.

The first thing Silva did, before any tactical question, was keep Mitrović in the building. The reasoning was straightforward. Mitrović in the Championship the previous season had scored thirty-three goals. Mitrović in the Premier League had scored three. The story said he was a Championship striker who could not finish at the top level. The retained-faith story said he was a striker who had played a Premier League season in a side that had created very little, and that with the right service he was the best number 9 in the second tier by a distance. Silva agreed with the second reading.

The system that followed was, on paper, the 4-2-3-1 Silva would run for most of the next five years. Harrison Reed and a deeper midfielder behind. Tom Cairney as the captain in the middle. Harry Wilson, signed permanently from Liverpool on 25 July 2021 in a deal Sky Sports reported at around £12 million, out on the right. Fábio Carvalho, the academy graduate of the previous year, promoted to start as a 10. And on the left, varying between Neeskens Kebano, Ivan Cavaleiro and Bobby Decordova-Reid depending on the fixture. The number 9, every game, was Mitrović.

What changed under Silva was the service. Where Parker's Premier League team had built carefully and tried to find Mitrović in the box, Silva's Championship team got the ball wide quickly, drove crosses early, and trusted that nobody at Championship level could compete with Mitrović in the air or on the pull-back. The pull-back into Mitrović, in particular, was so reliable through the autumn of 2021 that the Cottage learned to stand up when the ball reached the byline. Wilson and Carvalho were among the team's most influential creative outlets. The team did not have to be subtle. It scored goals.

The team that emerged in October was not subtle, not pretty in every fixture, and not the slickest possession football. It was, however, a Championship side built to score in volume, and the volume was historic. Three of the wins ended 7-0. The Cottage in full voice for the goals between five and seven was a sound that had not been heard in years.

The Mitrović season. The number that re-wrote the Championship record book.

The 2021/22 season belongs to Mitrović in the way certain football seasons belong to one player. Forty-three Championship goals in forty-four Championship appearances. The previous post-merger second-tier record, Ivan Toney's thirty-one for Brentford the year before, was eclipsed in February. The Premier League era did not invent the goal-per-game season at the level below it. It mostly forgot the genre. Mitrović in 2021/22 made it appointment viewing again.

The shape of the season is worth holding in mind. Mitrović scored two in the opening-day win at Birmingham. He scored a hat-trick against Swansea at the end of September. He kept scoring through the autumn. He broke Ivan Toney's post-merger Championship scoring record in February against Peterborough at the Cottage, taking the thirty-second and thirty-third of his season in the same match with three months still to go. He kept scoring. He scored two in the Preston match that sealed promotion in April. He scored twice in the Luton match that sealed the title in May. He finished on forty-three goals in forty-four league appearances. The post-1992 second-tier record book is now his.

What made Mitrović that season was not just the volume of finishes; it was the variety. Headers, of course. He is a complete six-foot-three centre forward and would have led the Championship in headed goals alone. But the running, the work-rate, the late runs into the box, the half-volleys from the edge of the area, the chipped finish over the keeper at Reading, the cushioned headers across goal from a back-post position: this was the most rounded Mitrović any Cottage supporter had seen. The Premier League version he would briefly become in 2022/23 was a slightly different player. The Championship version in 2021/22 was the version that filled the seats and won the matches.

The forty-three is, in some ways, the cornerstone of the entire Silva era at Fulham. Without it, Fulham do not go up at a canter. Without going up at a canter, Silva is not as well-positioned in the manager market when the renewal conversations begin two years later. Without that promotion the way it happened, the whole arc of the next four PL seasons looks different. The cornerstone laid down in 2021/22 was Mitrović. The cornerstone laid down by Silva was the system that found him in the box again and again. Both are part of the same story.

Fulham 3-0 Preston North End. 19 April 2022. The Cottage. Sealed in front of the Hammersmith End.

The promotion clincher was, in its way, the perfect Cottage night. Preston came to SW6 on a Tuesday evening on 19 April. Fulham needed a win and a Bournemouth slip across the next two fixtures to be mathematically promoted, but in practical terms a win was enough: Fulham's goal difference at that point was comfortably better than third place. Mitrović scored two of the goals, Fábio Carvalho the third, and the Cottage spent the closing half-hour of the match counting through the songbook in the order it actually wanted to hear it.

Mitrović opened the scoring with the kind of header that had become the season's calling card, taking his Championship tally to forty as the Cottage roared. Carvalho added the second, the academy graduate in front of the Hammersmith End. Mitrović finished off the night with his second of the game, the goal that put the result beyond doubt. Three nothing. The second half was a procession.

The exact moment of mathematical promotion came a few days later, when Bournemouth dropped points in their next fixture. But for everyone at the Cottage on the Preston night, it had effectively happened by the time Mitrović wrapped up his second of the game. The Cottage knew, the players knew, Silva knew. The pints in the Crabtree afterwards were the pints of supporters who, for the first time in two years, were going to spend a summer looking forward to a Premier League opener rather than dreading a Championship trip to Bristol City.

Fulham 7-0 Luton Town. 2 May 2022. The night the title came home.

If the Preston game was the moment Fulham went up, the Luton game was the moment the title came home. A Bank Holiday Monday, 2 May 2022, Craven Cottage. Luton in the away end, knowing they were heading for the play-offs and that nothing they did at the Cottage was going to alter that. Fulham needing a win to seal the Championship title. What happened next was forty-three goals worth of crescendo arriving inside one ninety-minute window.

Eight scorers across the seven goals (with Mitrović getting two): Cairney, Tete, Carvalho, Mitrović, Decordova-Reid, Seri, Harry Wilson and Mitrović again. The forty-second and forty-third Mitrović goals of the season. The kind of standing ovation when the Serb was substituted that the Cottage had not given to a player in years. A trophy lift on the pitch that, by general agreement, was the loudest the Cottage had been since the play-off final at Wembley two years before.

The Luton 7-0 is the version of the 2021/22 team that most of us will keep in the memory. Not because it was the most tactical performance of the season (it was not), and not because Luton played particularly badly (they did not, on a season-long basis), but because everything Silva had been building since July landed inside the same ninety minutes. Mitrović with two. Carvalho with the academy goal. Seri, who would not feature for the club much longer, with a curler that the Cottage will never forget. Wilson, Tete, Cairney, Reid all on the sheet. The crowd standing for chunks of the second half. A title trophy lifted at the Cottage, in front of a sold-out Hammersmith End.

It is the moment, looking back, where the Silva era at Fulham was at its most uncomplicated. There were no contract negotiations open. There were no questions about whether the manager and the football operations side were on the same page. There were no European near-misses, because there was no Premier League to push for Europe in. There were no spring slumps, because there was no spring slump on a Championship-title campaign. It was, briefly, perfect. The Cottage in full voice, the trophy in hand, the manager and the captain and the striker all on the pitch at once. The Premier League awaiting in August. Everything still to play for.

Twenty-seven wins, ninety points, and one hundred and six goals.

The 2021/22 numbers, when you lay them out side by side, are the numbers of a team that did not just win the Championship but ran away with it.

One hundred and six league goals is the highest tally any second-tier side has produced in the modern era of Championship football. Ten points clear at the top, on a single season basis, is comfortable in any division. Mitrović's forty-three is the post-Premier-League-era record at the second tier and is unlikely to be touched any time soon. The team's defensive record, often forgotten in the conversation about the goals, was strong too: forty-three conceded in forty-six matches is bottom-quartile for a promoted side. Bernd Leno was still at Arsenal at this point. Marek Rodák played most of the games. Paulo Gazzaniga had a spell. The clean sheets came when they were needed.

What the season did for the long arc of the Silva era at Fulham was establish two things. One: the Cottage now had a manager who could win you a Championship title at a canter. That was always going to bring up the conversation about whether he could keep you in the Premier League once you got there, and it brought up that conversation correctly. Two: it bought the Cottage a Premier League season to enjoy, the first one since 2018/19, with most of the squad that had just delivered the Championship title in tact. That was the platform the next two years would be built on. The Mitrović sale was still a year away. The Palhinha sale was still three years away. The contract questions, the Saudi rejection, the spring slump pattern, the Khan transfer-business arguments: none of these had yet entered the chat. We will get to all of them in their proper time. For Part 1, the story stops on the night the title came home and the Cottage in full roar said goodbye to a Championship season that the club, on the balance of recent history, had no real right to enjoy as much as it did.