"We'd be lying if the dream wasn't Premier League," Ryan Reynolds said during his first appearance in front of the media at the Racecourse Ground back in October 2021, some 36 hours after watching Wrexham live for the first time alongside fellow Hollywood actor Rob McElhenney.
"We clearly have the structure and system potentially to allow us to grow at that scale. Why not dream big?" McElhenney added. Those bold comments from the Wrexham owners, who had completed a £2 million takeover of the club nine months earlier, were surprising considering they'd just witnessed a 3-2 defeat away at Maidenhead that left the Red Dragons six points adrift of the National League play-off places.
At that stage, their desire to turn Wrexham into a "global force" seemed like nothing more than a pipe dream. The Welsh outfit did go on to reach the play-offs, only to suffer an agonising 5-4 semi-final defeat to Grimsby Town, setting Reynolds and McElhenney's ambitious project back by a full year.
But that only strengthened their resolve. Wrexham bounced back to win the National League title in 2022-23 with a record points haul of 111, returning to the Football League after a 15-year absence, and won successive promotions for the first time in their 159-year history the following season by finishing second in League Two.
It was a remarkable achievement that forced the football world to start taking Reynolds and McElhenney seriously, but many outsiders still expected the fairy tale to peter out from there. After all, no club had ever earned three promotions on the spin in the top five tiers of English football.
Wrexham weren't fazed, though; it was just another wall to bust through en route to the big time. The hard work continued behind the scenes, and sure enough, the unstoppable Red Dragons freight train has kept running this season, all the way to a League One runners-up berth - secured by Saturday's win over Charlton Athletic - that now leaves them just one step away from the Premier League.