Why would anyone travel thousands of miles, spending a lot of money they haven't really got to watch their football team play a match they are absolutely certain to lose?I don't know, but I did it anyway.One or two so-called experts had cautiously predicted little Stoke City would produce one of the great shocks of recent years by beating billionaires Manchester City at Wembley last Saturday, finally bringing to an end the longest hunt for FA Cup success of any professional team in England 139 years and counting.I, on the other hand, knew there was no chance whatsoever.What the pundits didn't know, and what I did know, was that despite sweeping all before them in a never-before-seen string of sensational performances in the run-up to the final, an ominous cloud was about to descend over the Potters right as they were about to play the biggest match in their history: I, Tim Smith, was going to the game.The agonising truth is that while I've spent my entire life supporting my home town team in a manner bordering on the dangerously fanatical, I've been nothing but a bad luck omen since the day I was born.Throughout history and up to the end of the 1970s, Stoke were a force to be reckoned with, maybe not famous for winning trophies, but proud to boast some of the finest footballers England's ever produced, like Stanley Matthews and Gordon Banks, and generally competing with the best.Then I was born. Immediately a freak storm blew the roof off Stoke's Victoria Ground, all the good players were sold to raise funds for a new stand and a load of journeymen who would have been more at home in the local pub league were signed instead. Stoke fell from grace spectacularly.None of this was necessarily my fault, of course, and it was all gradually forgotten over the next few years as Stoke climbed their way back into the top division.Then my dad decided I was old enough to go with him to Stoke games, and things went badly wrong again.In the 1984/85 campaign, at the age of seven, I stood on the terraces in a state of general confusion as Stoke lost game after game, setting unenviable records for ineptitude in what came to be recognised, both statistically and anecdotally, as the worst season known to man. I wasn't really old enough to understand what was going on as I peered at the pitch from the fishing stool I used to stand on, but I was vaguely aware that Stoke were crap, and I accepted it as a fact of life that they always lost.I also knew that was my team and I was sticking with them.In the school playground, while the cool kids ran around in their Liverpool and Everton jerseys pretending to be Ian Rush and Gary Lineker, I was busy imagining I was Philip Heath. Who's Philip Heath? Exactly. But safe to say the Stoke team he played for never made it to the FA Cup final, he never played for England and, worst of all, he wasn't even good enough to command a place in the Panini sticker book we all owned.Yet there was something quite safe about backing a loser. The bitter arguments would rage between the kids who supported the big teams; I was generally left to wallow in the reflected mediocrity of Philip Heath, pitied by most of the other boys, yes, but at least nobody hated me.I'd like to think this also taught me one valuable life lesson: it's ok to lose. Unfortunately that's not the case. I hate losing more than anyone I know.Whatever life lesson I did pick up through supporting a bad football team, and surely there must be one, I hope to hell that it's useful because it was well and truly rammed down my throat for nigh on three decades.As the years went by, there was always one certainty in my life I could always bank on: Stoke would continue to be terrible. Bad in the league and even worse in the FA Cup, going out to teams of amateurs like Telford United and Nuneaton Borough.Then, about five years ago, something remarkable happened. I left England for Bermuda and, as if by magic, Stoke suddenly became good again. Under the management of an unfashionable bloke in a baseball cap, they got promoted to the Premier League and began chalking up impressive wins against the big teams on a regular basis. Whatever it was that had been holding them back, it had gone. I suspect it was me.Things got even better this year as, for the first time since the FA Cup was invented in the 1870s, the men from the Potteries made it all the way to the final. I watched the glorious run unfold from the Robin Hood pub, generally an emotional wreck screaming blue murder at the TV screen, and with a strange feeling I was doing my bit to help simply by not being there.When it came to the final, fellow Stoke fans told me to do the decent thing and stay the hell out of the country. But I was being pulled by a force so irresistable all rational thought went out of the window. I allowed myself to believe the curse wasn't real. I got myself a ticket in the press box courtesy of The Royal Gazette and, before I really realised what was going on, I was arriving at Gatwick on Saturday morning and making my way to Wembley on the tube.A short while later, as Yaya Toure smashed home his goal to seal an inevitable victory for the favourites against a Stoke side that had played the entire match as though they had lead in their boots and beer in their bellies, I realised I should have known better.Yet, painful as it was to watch City fans with their irritating Poznan dance (including the crazed fan sitting next to me who really shouldn't have been allowed in the press box in the first place), the wildness of their celebrations did remind me of the reason some of us spend decades cheering for a football club that always seems to lose: when your rubbish team finally comes good, the success tastes so much sweeter.One day, that will be Stoke. Probably the day after I die.