I’m not sure where it came from, a feeling that’s been absent for most of the season. A vague narrative thread so fine I feared that if I was to pull it too hard, it would snap. It came on Thursday, like a tiny piece of fluff that turns out to be integral to keeping your trousers up. The announcement that the game against Stevenage had been brought forward to allow it to be on Sky. 

I looked at the fixtures – 4th placed Peterborough, 8th placed Lincoln, 7th place Stevenage (now read: 4th, 6th, 8th), all at home, all in the space of six days. The data submariners were aghast; will nobody think of the fatigue? The ice baths? The recovery? You can’t do a high press mid block thingamibobby three times in six days, they’d looked at their spreadsheets and decided it can’t be done.

But, for me, bubbling inside was a different thought; think of the romance, think of the narrative. For most of the season, I’ve felt a disconnect, a kind of pointlessness as we’ve drifted from one under-whelming result to another. Liam Manning’s methodical success machine left me feeling a bit cold, Des Buckingham has juggled our form like a slippery bar of soap in the shower. Every time it popped out of his hand he’d bend over, pick it up and burn his bum on the hot tap. 

There’d been no actual point to the season, apart from acrimonious arguments about communication, engagement and ‘debt stacks’. Though remaining at the right end of the table, we’ve been engaged in the lamest promotion drive in history. Buckingham keeps reminding us the play-offs are still in our hands, but it’s still received with all the enthusiasm of your granny being forced to dance to Jump Around by House of Pain at a wedding reception.

Then, the announcement; three games in six days. Now that’s a story.

Act One had been pedestrian and messy. If it was a film, the editor might think of trimming it back a little, not leaving it forty odd games before revealing the story. It was a novel you’re told to ‘stick with’ because it gets better later on. But, did we need that time to unpack the context? To set up the final dramatic twist which will all take place in six days. Perhaps in years to come, this blog will do an article on ‘the six days which changed everything’ (via ChatGPT, including hyper-sexualised AI images of Greg Leigh, obviously). 

Now, this isn’t a film, you can’t dictate how it ends, it might be a car crash, it might not be. And, of course, if it is a car crash, six days of catastrophic collapse, is also a narrative. That’s kind of the point, in a film, the star leaps to safety at the last second, in sport it’s as likely to crush your spinal column through your skull as give you a happy ending. 

But, that’s Act Three, the conclusion, the denouement, the crescendo. In order to get from here to there, you need an Act Two. 

There are two iconic photos from our promotion season in 1996; Joey Beauchamp’s goal of the century against Blackpool and Stuart Massey hanging off the crossbar at Wycombe. What’s often forgotten is that those two photos were taken just 48 hours apart; a whole year that history now remembers in two split seconds of the same weekend.

That Easter weekend pushed the dial on promotion, we moved from fifth to third, but more than that, we had momentum and drive. Joey Beauchamp’s strike was a grand catharsis, shedding the horrors of his move to West Ham and Swindon. Scoring spectacular and important goals at The Manor was the reconnection of what he did with why he did it. Two days later, we destroyed Wycombe for the first time in a riot of colour, vaporising a weird superiority inferiority complex that had clouded our early engagements. We felt superhuman, people thought it cemented our play-off place, but we wanted more than that.

The international break last week gave us a bit of breathing space, we just needed some wide open spaces to provide a sense of perspective. Nobody is going to lie on their deathbed and say they wished they’d talked about Cherwell District Council’s planning committee more. Apart from Cherwell District Council, maybe, we wanted to think about bigger things. Football things.

No, that blank weekend was enough to turn our attention back to matter at hand. We’re effectively in a race for the league title of the ‘other division’, League 1.1. After that, who knows and more importantly, who cares? When the play-offs were first invented, the three teams outside the promotion spots at the top of the division played the team just outside the relegation zone of the division above, League One has proved to be something similar because it’s two divisions in one.

Portsmouth down to Barnsley in fifth is a division in itself, and then there’s the rest. At the start of the season, it was widely believed that this was the weakest League One for years, what we hadn’t quite grasped was that we’re included in that calculation. A bit like the Sat Nav advert ‘You’re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic’… we’re not in a poor division, we are the poor division.

So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Shrewsbury proved to be re-run of previous woes – take the lead, fail to capitalise, concede a sucker punch. The Joey Beauchamp volley, the Stuart Massey hanging off the crossbar moment didn’t come. Is that just Oxford being Oxford? Or is it just another frustration designed to make the six day explosion of joy that propels us into the play-offs all the more joyful?

At the moment, we’re like a Drum and Bass DJ constantly playing his favourite tune, then just as it drops doing audacious rewind and starting again. We never quite get to dance. At Shrewsbury we did it again, so if Six Days in April is going to mean anything at all, then we’ve run out of road; if Act 2 is going to set up the big finish, that has to happen on Monday.

And I guess, that’s the thread I’m hanging on to, gently pulling it as slowly as possible in the hope that it might, finally, produce a narrative that gives this season meaning. Call me a fool, call me naive, but if you’re going to surf the best wave, all you can do bob around in the water, looking at the horizon.