Earlier this year I went for afternoon tea at The Ritz. At this juncture, let me reassure you, this is not my usual Costa. 

As we arrived we passed a young couple; he had a rugby player’s build and an ill-fitting suit, she was immaculately dressed but wearing an unnaturally conservative outfit for her age.

It turned out they were sitting at the table next to us and joined by three generations of his family. They appeared to be celebrating the birthday of the grandfather who was there more in body than in mind.

The rest of the table was stereotypical – the avuncular father eager to ensure the young woman was OK, the younger sister effortlessly striking a balance between millennial openness and multi-generational politeness, the apparently distant and austere mother unable to crack a smile and the emotionally vacant grandmother and her befuddled husband. 

They politely navigated through conversations about the culturally enriching holidays of the elders while, most likely, the young woman preyed not to be asked about her last holiday which was on a beach in a thong bikini drinking cocktails from a hollowed out coconut. 

Every now and then, out of sight of the rest of the table, the young man would reach across and reassuringly touch her thigh or stroke her arm. Occasionally they would grab each others’ hand. In return she’d give him a slightly grimaced grin, signalling that she was fine if not entirely comfortable. At one point they excused themselves to go to the toilet at the same time, I assume, to give each other a pep talk. 

The tea seemed to pass without incident, but the woman radiated the desire for it to be over and for them to be able to go home, put on some jogging bottoms and eat ready meals in front of Emily In Paris.

There have been times when The Championship has felt like this; this season is an afternoon in vaulted company enjoying a treat whilst simultaneously being on constant alert that one misstep will result in us being found out and humiliated. 

After five consecutive draws, Sunderland felt like it might be the day in which we, metaphorically speaking, let slip about an intimately placed tattoo we’d had done one drunken night in Lombok.

There was a general acceptance that defeat was inevitable, the question was more about its manner. An absolute trousering might prove to be a wrecking ball through our fragile confidence. Losing with dignity or without raising a stir was probably as good as we could hope for. 

Sunderland are surging right now, they’ve beaten Burnley and Luton and kept seven clean sheets in twelve games, you only have to see who they’re leading in the table and by how much to realise that this was never a fixture to benchmark ourselves again.

In this context, the 2-0 defeat wasn’t the battering some feared, although we barely laid a glove on them. Afterwards Ciaron Brown admitted we didn’t give them enough to think about and Des Buckingham said ‘Look, we tried’ like he was evaluating a primary school nativity in which two of the sheep got into a shoving match and Mary held the baby Jesus doll by the ankles. That said, it was just about what we expected, maybe even a little better.

There are a couple of generations of Oxford fans who have no experience of us playing in a division in which we’re a perpetual underdog. For years we could reasonably expect to be competitive against everyone, in League One there were a few isolated fixtures in which a win was deemed too much to dream of.

In the Championship, those isolated games are more likely to be extended periods in the pain cave. Back at The Manor it wasn’t unusual to lose sequences of games, you just had to tuck yourself in and hope the battering would come to an end. Our recent sequence which has included Sunderland, West Brom, Burnley and Luton, could easily have been such a run and it turns out not to have been.

The season, like managing relations with your in-laws, isn’t about tiptoeing around trying to avoid the difficult moments. It’s more like stock car racing, you go broadly in the direction you think will work best; sometimes you hit things, sometimes they hit you. 

The result is that you’re in a permanent state of injury crisis, you don’t rotate the squad, it rotates for you and you can still do your best and not get results. At the end of the season having spent ten months rolling around in a cement mixer, you just have to take stock and if you’re still functioning, then you’ve won.

While we can lament our limitations, nobody else will look at a 2-0 defeat away to Sunderland and think our bubble’s burst. Nor should we benchmark ourselves against their standards, it’s meaningless. Nobody went into this season thinking we’d compete against those with Premier League aspirations, particularly away from home. The defeat was ultimately fairly harmless, there were no more injuries and even if we’d fashioned a draw it would have lifted us just one place. We only need three teams below us at the end of the season, we currently have ten. We should be no less fearless or hopeful because of the Sunderland result. We need to remember, first and foremost, we’re still here for a good time. If we’re lucky that might turn into a long time.