In our feverish, saturated media world, everything is hyperbolic. The only way to penetrate the media morass is to make your message razor sharp to slice through the endless bedlam. “Susanna Reid Announces Shock Departure From GMTV” screams the Mail or Express for a story about the TV presenter going on holiday. “Naga Munchetty berates co-presenter in on-screen bust-up” when ‘reporting’ a conversation about whether jam should go before cream on a scone.

As a result, our everyday language evolves, we bend reality to be heard and generate social capital. Mundane things become startling claims, nuance is lost. Preston, we were told by some, was a ‘must-win game’ off the back of three defeats. It implied we were on a cliff edge, a precipice from which there was no return. 

It wasn’t that, but it was the kind of game we need to win to survive the Championship. If we don’t beat teams like Preston at home, then we’re going to need to find points from somewhere more difficult.

Our squad has been transformed over the summer with an avalanche of signings. At times it felt like pre-Christmas frenzy of Amazon orders, every time you got home there’d be a delivery card through the door and a midfielder tucked behind the wheelie bins.

Now it needs to settle, merge and mould into a singular unit. We have too many quality players to fit into a starting eleven. The players must know this, they’ll expect a battle to play. We, as fans, obsess over starting elevens because that’s where the prestige is. In fact, a player’s ability to come on and impact the final half-an-hour is equally important, as is their ability to influence games when they’re introduced unexpectedly early. The players will be under no illusions that a squad will be needed to bring success this season.

After the novelty of the Norwich game, I was expecting Preston to be something of a come down. Instead the mood was just as buoyant, arriving at the ground, we were confronted by a tsunami of fans in new home shirts, Baxi’s brand recognition searing itself into the consciousness of a generation. If this season is a success, in decades to come, grown adults all over Oxfordshire will burst into tears at the mere sight of a HP40 Monobloc Air Source Heat Pump. Forget the Oasis 90s revivalism, Baxi is Gen Z’s Unipart.

We headed for the club shop; confronted by at least six different shirts with Baxi logos on. I thought I was having a domestic heating system whitey, until I realised it was a wall of Preston fans in retro shirts. At the shop the queue snaked out the door and wasn’t moving. I looked through the window, it continued throughout the shop, the club is alive. 

Preston, by contrast, feel like a club built for a long time, not a good time. They’re approaching a decade in the Championship and have never troubled the scorers at either end of the table. They’ve won two FA Cup ties and made the fourth round of the League Cup on three occasions. As I sit here today, I would kill for that kind of record, in ten years I suspect I might be a bit tired of the perpetual inertia.

Their squad is all limbs and blonde man-buns, which may be down to lookalikes Stefan Thordarson and Brad Potts. Scanning the rest of the team, keeper Freddie Woodman appears to be at least the fifth or sixth tallest player in the team. It looks like a Scandinavian invading army, built like a reliable Volvo.

From the off they crashed through us, overwhelming the metronomic Josh McEachran causing the rest of the midfield to collapse in on each other. Within seconds they’d skied a clear chance, moments later Jakobsen scored. He’s Danish, go figure.

Perhaps this is the real Championship, we’d either be overwhelmed by quality or pillaged by marauding physicality. We suddenly appeared feeble, McEachran’s inclusion looked like a serious error; there were times in League One when he looked off the pace, in the Championship he was positively drowning.

But we under-estimate McEachran; during our promotion in 1996, Denis Smith swapped the blistering pace of Chris Allen with the pace-less Stuart Massey on the wing. Massey demanded the ball at his feet, we became more considered. Balls into the box to Paul Moody were more measured, we started winning games. It transformed our season.

McEachran slowly regained his footing. He weathered the storm, didn’t panic and began to play, the midfield re-constituted around him, composure returned. After twenty minutes he landed a cross onto the head of Mark Harris for the equaliser.

Injuries to Matt Phillips and Joe Bennett, his prodigiously white teeth shining like a beacon as he grimaced on the touchline, provided a sense of foreboding. Amy Cranston’s valedictory treatment of Phillips was greeted with a smattering of applause. The mood became more bleak.

Undeterred, our collective mind cleared, McEachran dictated the pace, allowing others to play. Dembele, introduced prematurely in place of Phillips, showed flashes of brilliance, exhausting the bodies and minds of Preston’s defence. 

Dembele’s introduction bumped Goodrham to the opposite wing. Charmingly accommodating, he took on the challenge without complaint. Just before the hour he took a touch but was bustled off the ball. His talent seemingly suffocated by the wise heads of the Preston back-four.

Moments later, the ball returned to his feet. Goodrham’s special quality is that he lacks ego, he learns well. He has ability within himself alongside an intelligence to analyse his situation from the outside. It’s like a drone hovers above his head.

He shaped to cross, but this time cut inside, a narrow corridor was open to him. It wasn’t direct, he’d have to bend the ball beyond the post. It left his foot, arcing, curving, from where we sat, it looked like he’d be denied by physics. 

But it found a path, dipped, curved and looped, while we collectively prepared for the ball to drift wide, the net billowed. He’d calculated an improbable route to goal. Behind Goodrham, Kioso hunched in disbelief, Rodrigues and Harris erupted in celebration, Brannagan looked on proudly his arms in the air. This is why he stays.

We didn’t relent, we retained energy deep into the final half-hour, Liam Lyndsey was bamboozled into a second yellow by Mark Harris. With twenty minutes to go, Dembele and Long, the new and the old, combined to cross for Brown to knock down to Leigh for number three – the established and the marginal. It was a goal symbolic of the moulding of our established promotion squad with the sprinklings of stardust from the summer.

Winning is great, scoring spectacular goals is fantastic, but survival remains the goal. There will be bleak days and struggle, but the last two home games have shown that whatever happens, it promises to be fun. At this stage, it’s all we need.