Most football stories are written backwards – the focal point is a career or club defining triumph from which a thread is drawn back through the months, years and decades to find its origins. The aim is not to describe the planned and accidental circumstances which brought about that win, but to create a clear undeniable pathway of destiny.

Many footballer’s autobiographies literally open with a chapter on the pivotal moment of their career, before reverting back to the cobbled streets of their childhood to retrace their steps. It creates a myth that these things are pre-written.

Perhaps it’s because we are increasingly a post-war generation – people who haven’t nor want to experience a war – that we’ve become less interested in these supposed pivotal moments in global or personal histories. There is now a preference for social histories, the history of the mundane, where there is no defining pinnacle. There are three books by Mark Kurlansky – Milk, Cod and Salt, which tell the stories of how these three run-of-the-mill things shaped our societies over many generations. They’ve probably had more impact on everyday folk than the battle of Agincourt. Most football stories, the ones that rarely make it into books or even anecdotes between fans, are social social histories. It’s The history of meandering nothingness, things which don’t really start or end, they mould and shape. The kind of history that ultimately defines a club like Oxford United.

When the rare, glorious moments come, you can sense it; in 2016, I was confident we’d be promoted even though the margin of error towards the end was virtually nil. It was a team that almost couldn’t fail. In 2010, likewise, promotion looked an inevitability from the early games, even if the gap we had to squeeze through was much narrower than in the Football League.

Of course, memory has edited out the blips – both seasons had big wobbles which could have derailed the end point. Instead, they merely created more theatre for the eventual triumph. In April 2016 we went through a sequence of one win in six, which just set up the final three victories that sealed promotion. In April 2010, it was one in eight before re-finding our form and storming through the play-offs.

But there was still a vibe that something was happening, something which is hard to detect this season. At the start of the season it felt like we’d found a promotion pace, then Liam Manning left and we seemed to be heading back our normal state of perpetual transition, then Des Buckingham started and the story took on a new dimension, now a few games in and a defeat to Peterborough and it’s hard to know quite who we are.

Buckingham was pitched as a continuity candidate, which is unfair because he isn’t. He may have some of the same schooling as Liam Manning, but to constrain him to being Manning 2.0 leaves him nowhere to go. He needs to be allowed to be Buckingham 1.0.

The challenge is that what he’s inherited, at least in terms of league position, was nigh on perfect. He just needed to be a coach that changed precisely nothing. I’d argue that that there was a degree of luck involved in getting to that position – we scored nine goals in four games between Stevenage and Blackpool, eight of which were scored by defenders. That’s not a normal cadence, although we take that kind of luck and Manning will rightly argue you create your own, it’s not the kind of sequence we can expect throughout the season. There were structural weaknesses in the squad, particularly as a goalscoring threat, that had yet to be fully tested.

Now is the time when we’re going to be fully tested. We’ve done the preamble and are now at the foothills of the middle section of the season, but it’s hard to know if we’re prepared for it. This is the section which rattles the bones – games are relentless or disrupted, injuries throw you to the left and right, the transfer window opens and you wait to see what you’ll lose or gain. Plotting and planning goes out the window, decisions have to be made in an instant. There’s a sequence in the podcast Karl Robinson did for the BBC where he’s discussing with his staff how they’re going to navigate a three or four game sequence with hotel stays (Robinson rules out one hotel because he thinks its haunted). You get a sense of how these decisions are closer to random guesses than objective opinion. Admittedly, that might be a Robinson trait.

Liam Manning never had to make these decision or face these dilemmas. His legacy is cast in amber, having negotiated only the calmer waters of the opening phase of the season. Now Des Buckingham is burdened with what comes next without the benefit of being involved in any of the pre-season strategising. He and we just have to hope we’re robust enough to withstand the roughest seas.

In a season that seems to be struggling for a narrative, it’s perhaps fitting that we now face a derby which has been in deep freeze for nearly a quarter of a century. In truth, we have no idea what it’ll be like when it’s thawed on Tuesday. They may be too pre-occupied with their own woes to really notice or may play with a freedom we don’t have. And the fans? Many will have no experience of a Reading derby, any vitriol will be, ultimately, performative, because there’s nothing for us to resent them for, apart from a vague notion of a rivalry we have little knowledge of. In a season without a central story, this is set to be a derby without one either.