Easter always signals the final turn for home in the season. Like the spring sunshine highlighting the hidden cobwebs and imperfections in your house, the sun exposes the realities of the season both good and bad.

The divisions break up into mini leagues – promotion, play-offs, relegation, while other teams are cannon fodder, completing the season for kicks and spoiling parties where they can. We should be so lucky.

Most relegation run-ins are filled with angst and dread. While we’ve known we’re in a relegation fight for some time, and we’re still on a terrible run of results, but we seem to be sanguine about our prospects.

The main reason is Liam Manning. Either because he’s brought a sense of calm, or perhaps it’s because the previous sense of chaos has now left the building. Perhaps he doesn’t feel the pressure – nobody will blame him if we do get relegated – but his pragmatism seems to be filtering through the club; a sense that as we bottom out, the only way is up. 

Was the mood calm or subdued before kick-off? Traffic problems meant the stands filled slowly and even the presence of Sky TV was low-key. They covered four games on Friday and had a full set of Premier League fixtures on Saturday. With it being a bank holiday weekend, it felt like our game was being covered by a skeleton staff. 

Manning’s great re-set has started from the back. He seems keen for the squad to unlearn the bad habits that have got us into this mess. Like the victim of a horrendous accident, we’ve gone right back to learning to walk again. These early hard yards are dour and pragmatic; the focus against Peterborough was on shape, discipline and not conceding – scoring and entertainment would have to wait. 

It looked like we’d get more of the same against Wednesday, right up until Simon Eastwood put on an idiosyncratic opening twenty minutes of fluffed kicks and dropped shots that might alert the FA to investigate unusual betting patterns relating to money being placed on one goalkeeper trying score an own-goal off his face. 

When we did offer some attacking threat, it seemed to be deliberately channelled through set-pieces. We have neither a forward-minded creative playmaker nor an instinctive goalscorer anymore. Marcus Browne’s delivery from free-kicks is direct and aggressive and has the potential to cause mayhem in the box, it’s a good route to try that doesn’t risk disrupting the defensive foundation we’re trying to establish.

The problem is when we do concede, at the heart of Barry Bannan’s goal was his ability to do what we’ve been missing all season. All open play goals require someone to do something that nobody expects – break the rules in a very specific and limited way. Bannan, who looks like a cross between Lionel Messi and an artisan cheesemaker, has developed an almost mythical status in the division for this. In football, when a player’s legs ‘have gone’, they gain an almost transcendent state. People obsess over how much Lionel Messi walks during a game, like he’s ominously reading its runes ready to pounce at any sign of vulnerability. Bannan’s the same, when he’s not doing much, we grow suspicious that he’s hatching a cunning plan.

Nobody could really complain about his goal, which he threaded through a melange of players arcing wide of the far post before bending in. It had an unearthly quality; your brain tries to reject what it’s just seen because it can’t compute it. We haven’t seen quality like that since, perhaps, Kemar Roofe. On the sidelines, Manning looked on, perhaps ruing that he hadn’t brought his scoring lessons forward a week or so.

At half-time the scores elsewhere filtered through; Accrington, Burton and Cambridge were all winning, only goal difference kept us out of the relegation zone. Rather than chase the game, Manning swapped Wildschut for O’Donkor, the dutchman looks like he’s trying to control a rugby ball at times, he’s unpredictable and frustrating, which isn’t the current vibe, O’Donkor’s game is uncomplicated – chase, harry, be physical.

It did the trick, after Eastwood showed what a good keeper he can be, including one save that even he seemed to surprised to have made, we started to show some attacking threat. Balls went down the flank, crosses were put into the box, it’s all very simple when you think about it. Wednesday have their own problems, having looked unbeatable they seem to have got promotion yips. Whereas our doubts might be subsiding, theirs are growing. After a couple of breakthroughs, they began to wobble.

Getting balls into the box opens up opportunities, and finally one came. The penalty looked soft, Browne stumbling over Akin Famewo as he chased for the ball. Had it been in the centre-circle, it probably would have been a free-kick and we did have a decent shout for another foul in the box a few minutes earlier, so on the balance of probability one of the claims was probably worthy of a penalty, but for that challenge alone, the punishment seemed disproportionate, which is often the case with penalties. 

Cameron Brannagan now sits in front of the back four to provide more cover, it means we have less twenty-five yard Hail Marys to enjoy or endure, less tantrums when things go wrong. Though less visible, he’s more effective when he’s part of the whole, rather than trying to single handedly drag the whole out of a hole. He like being a hero though, this gave him the perfect chance.

Given his last-minute miss at Hillsborough, Josh Murphy wisely avoided getting into a debate about who’d take the kick. Brannagan’s strike was emphatic, another morsal of hope returned. 

There were chances to win it, but we’ll take the point. The draw means we’re now thirteen games without a win, but rather like an ageing porn star filming yet another tawdry scene, we’ve become numb to the dispiriting context of what we’re living through because, increasingly, we know it’ll soon be over and better times should lie ahead.

Despite slipping closer to the relegation zone, against Peterborough and Sheffield Wednesday we’ve gained two points that we hadn’t expected to. We can’t control what others do, we can only try to meet and exceed our own goals, what’s encouraging is that collectively – management, players, fans – we all seem to know that. When you have that cohesion, then you’ve got a chance.