There is a moment before any rugby match when anticipation reaches its peak, that split second before the teams run out.

At the StoneX on Saturday, peak-excitement came from the 25 girls from three Kent clubs, flags in hand on either side of the players’ path, legs still weary from their own match. The players ran out between them, pros passing girls who may one day have their own guard of honour.

Saracens' under 14 girls’ festival had been called off for lack of entries. A measure, perhaps, of how much of the girls’ game is still being built. 7Wells, a cluster of TWRFC and Sevenoaks RC, exists for the same reason, and their families had tickets for a post-festival afternoon PWR Cup match. So TWRFC stalwart James Kilgallon, who'd entered us, arranged a fixture with Ashford instead, Dean Ward provided a trophy and medals. Sid rallied Sevenoaks, Ashford’s Kelly Burns and her team were the other half of the fixture team and Kieran Hopper from Saracens made it happen.

Ten a side on a premiership rugby pitch asks a lot of young legs and lungs. The match report has the rugby. The girls got all the game time they wanted and every girl got a medal.

And then after an hours rest, girls were corralled into that guard of honour. Sophie and Robyn, the players of the match from 7Wells and Ashford, were Saracens’ mascots, lining up in the team photo. Felicity, Phoebe and Holly were ball girls, in purple bibs on the touchline, away from their friends, fetching and towelling balls for throwers.

At half-time the entertainment was 7Wells and Ashford again, playing touch rugby where a touched defender had to drop and roll sideways; a touched attacker had to go to ground and present the ball for a half back to pass away. It went through phase after phase, and a crowd that had come for the PWR Cup cheered a game between girls who'd already played a full match.

Following the main PWR Cup match, girls hugged the touchline in pursuit of signatures. A second guard of honour as autograph queue.

There was the club shop, where a campaign of nagging, waged with the aggression of a forward pack camped on the try line, ended in the varied way such campaigns always end: time out for those overstepping the mark, goodie bags for the canny facing more lenient refs. More than one Saracens bear and scarf found room in a kit bag that had been full at eight that morning.

What made the day, though, was that for ten hours the phones mostly stayed in pockets. There were photographs, of course, and a few videos, but nobody spent the day watching a screen to find out what was happening elsewhere. Brothers and sisters and grandparents and step-parents and partners and friends were here. The week has its own rhythm, school for the girls, work and domestic grind for adults. Saturday offered something else, something bigger and shared. One of 25 on the pitch forming a tunnel and a voice in a crowd. Being a part of three clubs who decided that a cancelled festival did not have to mean a cancelled day.

Girls in sport are so often the afterthought. In 2022 Women in Sport found that 43% of girls who saw themselves as sporty at primary school drift away as teenagers, against 24% of boys. Inclusion on Saturday was somebody deciding that a girls’ day was not what got cancelled. There are Saracens flags in Kent today in the homes of 25 girls who saw that our game has room for them at its centre.