Twickenham Stadium© Clive Gee/PA Wire/Press Association Images

To see your home town team at Twickenham is perhaps no more than birth right if you hail from Bath, Gloucester or Northampton.

It is a different matter if you grew up in Bridgnorth, Shropshire. So once their qualification for the RFU's Intermediate Cup Final became known, it was a firm date in the diary, even if it meant a third east-west schlep across London in less than 48 hours.

It is not that I can claim much of a relationship with the club. I was taught PE by one of their early stalwarts - a standard experience of that generation in Bridgnorth, whichever end of the selective divide you landed. It was Dave Turnock at the Grammar School, Ricky Szota at the Secondary Modern. But I was never anywhere near a school team, never mind graduating to the Colts teams they were setting up down at Severn Park.

But to have grown up in Bridgnorth in the 1970s is to know that the team which played at Twickenham is a second flowering of talent from a market town with a population of around 10,000.

Founded in 1964, it was one of the clubs formed as television coverage brought the game to a wider public. It was also the beneficiary of an educational quirk. In most towns it was the grammar school which played rugby. In Bridgnorth it was, until the Grammar School broadened its offering in the early 1970s, the secondary modern - meaning that the rugby club had access to a much higher proportion of local sporting talent than in most towns. They expanded rapidly, adding teams and taking over the old Bull pub, hard by the bridge over the River Severn, as their clubhouse.

Memory suggests that the Bridgnorth Journal of the time chronicled an almost endless list of victories featuring names like Messrs Turnock and Szota and Alan Stoll, who was among the presentation party at Twickenham in his role as club president.

They produced an England player in back-rower Mark Keyworth, capped from Swansea, who died late last year. I've always wondered how far they might have gone had they had the means of progression now offered by the leagues. But in those days it was a matter of persuading fixture secretaries of more-established clubs that you would still be worth playing in five years' time, so the same names kept on turning up on the fixture list and eventually that founding generation grew old together.

When leagues finally came, the club settled in among the solid citizens of the North Midlands, an integral part of town life, but rarely of great matter to those outside the region. Until the last couple of seasons that is, when the Intermediate Cup offered a route to more national notice.

Thus it was that the concourses of Twickenham, echoing a day earlier to the tones of the Var and the Auvergne, were full of that familiar but distinctive accent with its mix of urban West Midland and rural Salopian. It was a day out for the town, and Bridgnorth's fans were a vibrant presence, their voices raised in unison whenever events on the field offered reasons for hope or celebration.

Probably the loudest roars of the afternoon were those which greeted the Bridgnorth tries scored by skipper Dan Griffiths, driven over in a collective forward effort and wing Will Biddell, crashing over near the posts after a perfectly timed and angled incursion.

The trouble was that by the time Griffiths went over in the 67th minute the scoreboard read 'Bridgnorth 6, Maidstone 31'. Maidstone were simply, for as long as it took to put the outcome beyond doubt, much too good.

If anyone had forgotten that they were once a National League club, the first 30 minutes were a reminder, starting with a second minute try by centre Olly Newton, channelling his inner Bastareaud to crash through three tacklers to the line with an overlap still available outside him. That score came after a Bridgnorth clearance kick was charged down, and that was the story of the first half with Maidstone just too quick and sharp for their opponents, denying Bridgnorth time and space and constantly pinning them back in their own territory.

There were moments of resistance like a heroic goal-line stand which kept a Maidstone rolling maul at bay in the 15th minute, but they were postponements of the inevitable rather than turning points.

Shortly afterwards Maidstone wing Alex Eastwood went over in the corner, scrum-half Ben Pitkin landing the touchline conversion to make it 17-0. It was 24-0 by the half hour, back rower Josh Pankhurst soloing from around 35 metres. Bridgnorth, who made several first-half replacements in an attempt to stem the tide, will remember the rest of the match more fondly. Two penalties by Biddell rewarded territorial pressure before half-time, when it was 24-6.

They continued in the same vein after the break, but when Maidstone struck again with a 50th minute score by open side Eddie Cranston and Pitkin's conversion, a real humiliation seemed possible. Pride, though, was fully restored in the final half hour. Roared on throughout, Bridgnorth narrowed the gap with those two tries - Biddell's 72nd minute score to make it 31-18 raising the brief fantasy of an improbable revival. It did not happen, of course. There were no more scores and nobody could dispute that Maidstone were deserved winners - a doubly memorable day for their skipper Ben Williams who proposed marriage on the touchline after receiving the cup (happily, she said yes).

Nobody comes to a cup final to be satisfied with being runner-up. Bridgnorth can certainly play better than they did in the first 30 minutes. But they left with heads held high, worthy participants in both an entertaining spectacle and the mutual guards of honour which the two teams formed on their way to receive their medals. And it is days like these that establish a rugby club as a real force in a town, reaching beyond players, officials and their families to make it part of collective folk memory.