Imagine a Venn diagram, in one circle there’s nothing, in the other circle there’s nothing, in the intersection there’s my knowledge of Peterborough. I have absolutely no concept of Peterborough; what it’s like, where it is, its history, who lives there. I have similarly little knowledge of its football team. Barry Fry, Darragh thingamabob (the owner), and Darren Ferguson, that’s it. They occasionally arrive from League One central casting, sometimes they even get promoted, but beyond that I know nothing.

So, when brinyhoof suggested a Thelma and Louise-style road trip to wherever it was we ultimately ended up, I took it. It’s not one of those away days where you end up in a soup of other football pilgrims at a service somewhere north of Birmingham, it’s a meander through featureless A roads. There’s the odd standalone McDonalds and a remarkably big shopping centre in Rushden, but we’re not navigating Route 66 here.

It felt like a long time since the Derby game, since then, a revolution has been underway. There was also a sense of nihilism – in my great end of season predict-o-rama, nearly 70% of you thought we’d come away with nothing. Going nowhere to get nothing had a certain romance to it. In fact, when a work colleague asked about my weekend plans I found myself glowing with pride telling him my plan was to go to Peterborough to watch a team that hasn’t won in eleven games. I suspect I’ll have HR enquiring about my wellbeing on Monday.

When brinyhoof bought our tickets, we debated whether we wanted top or bottom tier. We opted for top tier because it would be a better view. Having navigated a turnstile so small it was clearly designed for our emaciated, forebears suffering starvation from after The Great Depression, it turned out the choice was between cramped plastic seats and cramped wooden seats. Each one was moored by reassuringly rusted and sturdy metal bolts clearly driven into the terrace sometime before the invention of television. We folded ourselves into the space so small, being over six foot tall, by half-time, I’d lost all feeling in my foot due to a lack of blood supply.

Approaching the ground, you get a sense that Posh fans are reassured by the monotonous certainty of the matchday experience. Despite the reputation of its owners, the reality is more mundane. It is neither a progressive ambitious club, nor a failing entity, it is just there. There’s little sense of an ambition beyond staying in business. To punctuate the pedestrianism, three mascots navigated the pitch pre-match to bring some sense of fun to the proceedings. Two copyright breaching Bob The Builder types (presumably representing stadium sponsors Weston Homes) each had giant fixed stares and faintly sinister maniacal grins on their oversized foam heads. Students of the marketing profession will appreciate that this is a sure-fire way to get children interested in large scale housing development. 

They were accompanied by a threadbare rabbit mascot called Peter Burrow – imagine the stellar career someone’s had off the back of that moment of genius. This is not to be confused with their left-back Harrison Burrows who shows no signs of being lapin-like and is therefore no relation, despite being such a local we saw him walking home from the stadium after the game.

Incidentally, having looked it up, Peterborough’s cathedral can be traced back to a monastery founded by an abbot named Sexwulf (more likely Seaxwulf, but let’s go with Wikipedia’s typo), it beggars belief that the club haven’t developed a fun mascot called Sex Wolf dressed in leathers that louchely engages middle aged fans in some family-fun-filled half-time on-pitch dogging. Instead we had some kids chipping a ball into a skip.

Liam Manning said that the performance showed what they’d been working on in training. Defending from the front, protecting a point as a priority, he’s been clearing out the mental clutter of the latter Robinson era. There’s only so much he can achieve without the benefit of time or a transfer window, so team shape and attitude is where he can hope to get some improvement.

It worked, Josh Murphy who’s looked lost all season, seemed more content working as part of a whole. He no longer had to prove himself to be the best player in the division on his day or whatever it was Robinson called him. Yanick Wildshut and Kyle Joseph looked similarly more comfortable working hard for the team rather than than carrying it. Robinson had put half the team on pedestals in the hope it might inspire them, instead it seemed to fill them with dread and make them lose their minds. It was a newfound team-focus, a work ethic to achieve a collective objective over-writing the Robinsonian desire to blast our way out of trouble with moments of genius from the best players in the blah blah blah. 

In truth, it made the game rather featureless, we were low down in the stand so you could see the effort being put in, but the game lacked any urgency and there were only half-chances throughout. There was one moment when the Oxford fans became particularly animated, but the ball was being worked backwards from an attacking position, through the midfield and along the backline. A collective appreciation of being in the trenches together, solidarity renewed. 

It felt like we’re over the grieving of what we seemed to have lost this season, we’re beyond the anger of what caused that. We’re now settled to achieve a goal of avoiding relegation. It’s not the original goal, nobody who travelled to Derby on the opening day of the season expected it, but it’s our reality and that’s what we have to deal with.

Only in the last few moments, including eight gargantuan minutes of injury time, did anxieties begin to creep in. While we’d gone into the game anticipating a defeat, the point was now in our hands, players threw themselves into challenges as their minds screamed for them to stop. They refused to let this one go. The referee finally brought the game to an end, fans and players celebrated together like it was a win. A bit embarrassing really, but at the same time reassuring; a trip to nowhere, expecting nothing, but getting something, a good day out.