Sunk in yet? Does it seem real? Took ages for me - probably right up to the day when the fixtures were published. Probably not helped by the fact that I couldn't make that Yeovil game; like a donkey, I'd carefully cleared my diary for the play-offs. (Never have I been more pleased to be wrong!)

And now here we are, with Forest signing players who wouldn't even have considered us just a few short weeks ago. OK, so we're probably not back to the days when the European Championships were a place to look at realistic transfer targets - I don't think Andrei Arshavin or Wesley Sneijder are winging their way to NG2 any time soon, alas - but at least we've got away from the land of "the likes of…".

You know what I mean? For the past 3 years the bitter conversation of Forest fans has been littered with that phrase: "Forest shouldn't be losing to the likes of Woking / Macclesfield / Brentford…" [delete as applicable for your own personal low point, though the list is long]. Most of us tried really really really hard not to be patronising, and we knew perfectly well that Forest weren't in Division 3 by accident and that we'd have to fight to get out of it. And boy, did we get heartily sick of that "You're not famous any more" dirge every week! In our hearts, though, despite all that, we knew that we shouldn't be there, and if we were honest an awful lot of our fellow-travellers came into the category of "the likes of…".

Wake up! The nightmare is over! Wolves, Wednesday & The Blunts, Derby, the Blue-noses and Ipswich Town await us, not (the likes of) Hereford, Peterborough or Stockport County. [And if it's now the turn of Leicester and (Ha!) Leeds to feel they're slumming it, that makes it feel just that little bit sweeter - I've never forgiven Leicester for worming their way out of their financial commitments a few years back, and Leeds are just Leeds]. No more Johnstone's Paint Sodding Trophy. We can't possibly go out of the FA Cup before January (even with our recent record). We won't be playing on International weekends. An occasional match report longer than 2 sentences might even appear in the national press. In short, Forest are back!

However (without wishing to appear too brown-nosed in my very first blog entry), all this made the Chairman's interview immediately after promotion became definite all the more encouraging. He could easily, on that dramatic day of all days, have revelled in it a bit, congratulated the players and the management, told us all to enjoy the Summer and left it at that. But he didn't. He said (I paraphrase, but the gist is right) that though obviously we're all pleased to be back in the Championship, we shouldn't relax and think we've made it; that's just getting back to the minimum standard, which was kind of where we started - and next time we leave the division it must be in the correct direction.

He's right, of course - though if escaping the land of "the likes of…" means that Forest fans revert to hoping that we beat everybody, as opposed to assuming we will and then getting increasingly mardy if it doesn't happen, then all the better. We've been rubbish for so long that there might even be the odd club out there who's thinking "we should be stuffing the likes of Forest". So be it; if so, we earned it!

But now it's over. To me, the whole attitude of the club feels different; I like the calibre of the players we are signing; I especially like the "we can do better than him" confidence that Forest have been showing in refusing to pay over the odds for some members of the promotion squad to stay; the horizons of ambition appear to have broadened considerably.

What a difference a Division makes! Let's enjoy it - no more "the likes of…"