For Coventry City there is finally scope for blue-sky thinking after sealing an immediate return to League One with a convincing play-off final win against Exeter City. For more than 37,000 baying Coventry supporters who made Wembley appear lopsided, the victory not only reversed an alarming slide but brought a first promotion for 51 years in arguably their biggest game since the 1987 FA Cup final.

Fine second-half goals by Jordan Willis, Jordan Shipley and Jack Grimmer were enough for Coventry’s unpopular owner, Joy Seppala, the chief executive of the hedge fund Sisu, to nudge her sunglasses on to her forehead so she could properly witness the sea of sky blue – enhanced by smoke bombs – below. The roar from those fans at full-time was even more telling.

“That reconnection between the players and the supporters is fundamental to building anything,” Mark Robins, the Coventry manager, said. “Coventry City supporters deserve the best and we have to try as much as we possibly can to give them that.

“It is a brilliant, brilliant day for everybody connected with Coventry City – I couldn’t be prouder, couldn’t be prouder. Even though we were getting relegated the win here against Oxford [in the Football League trophy] last year was the start for me. It was the wood in the door stopping that slide.”

Marc McNulty proved a livewire from the off, neatly dovetailing with Michael Doyle, described as “superhuman” by Robins. That particular combination was unsurprising given the pair are good friends, with Doyle influential in ensuring they ran out as team-mates this season. The Irishman “battered” McNulty’s phone, rang him 20-30 times in one week, sent him pictures of Coventry’s stadium and even met him at the airport after the striker flew down from Scotland. McNulty’s movement and Doyle’s guile was ultimately too hot for Exeter’s young, primarily homegrown defence to handle.

After an impressive first half Robins’s message at the interval was to serve up more of the same and, within four minutes, an unlikely source had delivered. After staying upfield from a corner Willis made the most of a slick Doyle pass, stepping inside before wrapping his right boot around the ball, sending a thumping effort beyond Christy Pym.

With one half of Wembley still reverberating, McNulty surged forward once more, bouncing off a couple of red-and-white shirts before spraying the ball wide to Shipley, whose shot deflected in off Pierce Sweeney. Grimmer then put the icing on the cake with a delicious curling effort. Playing in a one-off striped kit – its purpose questioned in more cynical quarters – after allegedly running out of their regular home strip, Coventry suddenly had victory sewn up.

“The kit was a bit contentious but seriously – honestly – after the game against Notts County Jordan Shipley came in without his top on and I just said to him: ‘Where’s your top?’ and he said he gave it away and I said: ‘Well you can’t play at Wembley then, we haven’t got any left,’” Robins said. “But, thankfully we found another 700 that we were able to badge up and sell the rest. It was a one-off kit with a nod to the 87 cup final.”

In the end it was a miserable bank holiday weekend for Exeter, with the city’s rugby union team defeated at Twickenham on Saturday. After successive play-off final defeats the Exeter manager, Paul Tisdale, is expected to relinquish his title as the country’s longest-serving manager, after 11 years and 336 days in the job.

For Steve Perryman, the club’s director of football retiring after 51 years in the game, there was no happy ending, with Kyle Edwards’s late strike merely a consolation.

Tisdale, a one-time team-mate of Robins at the Greek outfit Panionios 20 years ago, was non-committal over his own future and, asked as to where goes from here, his reply was canny. “Back down the M4, I get off at Wiltshire and go home,” the 45-year-old, who lives near Bath, said. “We will have a think in the next couple of days, get everyone together, and we have to start again. Exeter would like to keep me I believe, but we will have to see – that’s not a yes or a no.”