If you’re reading this, then the wifi’s working. All being well, I’m winding my way from Lake Geneva to Milan on a heavily train-based holiday. I feel like a proper writer, I should muse about steam billowing from the train’s funnel and the majesty of the Alps; as static as Phil Whelan and as wide as Matt Day…

Suffice to say, I didn’t go on Saturday. I was fine with that, carving out holidays and social engagements around fixtures is a fool’s game. For all the riotous hyperbole about injecting its nectar back into our veins, football’s rolling, unending presence nowadays means one season mostly merges into another, seeping into every crevice of your being. It’s like being in an abusive relationship, gaslighting us that it’s back when it never really went away.

There was a time when the new season would burst forth after a gaping absence. Before we had the omniscient social media driven news cycle, conventional media would turn its attention to cricket, tennis and athletics to occupy the summer months. When football eventually returned, all the newness arrived at the same time; signings were first seen on the pitch, players were freshly over-tanned and occasionally overweight, new kits were rare but received with wonder. The new season blossomed into a great bloom of hope.

I remember sitting in a campsite just north of Rome listening to the staccato radio coverage of our first game in the First Division against West Brom in 1985. Through the static hiss, and shortwave squeals, the World Service would occasionally convulse an update from the Hawthorns. My dad would then announce it to the campsite while I dribbled around tree stumps pretending to be Dave Langan.

I made it to Watford the following year when we were blown away by the alliterative artillery of Barnes, Blissett and Bardsley. In 1997, I was at Loftus Road to see our last return to the second tier; a 2-1 defeat which announced the arrival of Nigel Jemson’s ego. Two years later I was on holiday when our new ‘black and white strike partnership’ (thanks, Oxford Mail) of Steve Anthrobus and Derek Lilley fused together to give us a 2-1 win away win over Stoke. They held such promise, but it would be five months before Anthrobus scored again and another year before he notched his third, and final, league goal of a two year tyranny.

Two years later we heralded a new era after being re-housed at The Kassam. We were drearily dismantled by Rochdale in the drizzle. Only a glorious Jamie Brooks’, lob lightened the mood. In 2004, I sulked in a traffic jam having misjudged how far Lincolnshire was, missing the 1-0 defeat to Boston who were led by the Sodom and Gomorrah of English football – Paul Gascoigne and Steve Evans.

In 2006, the ghosts of decline were cast aside (briefly) when Andy Burgess smote the ball into the back of the net for a winner against Chris Wilder’s Halifax, marking our inglorious debut in the Conference. I missed Mark Creighton’s adrenalised last-minute winner against York three years later which shot us towards promotion back to the Football League and the long forgotten lacklustre draw with Crawley that opened our 2015/16 promotion season.

I was on a pub crawl in London in 2013, the day we beat Portsmouth 4-1. Each goal was announced in a different pub making me think it was just reporting the same goal repeatedly. The win turned out to be a highly premature peak to the season.

We’ve been Burton’ed a couple of times; a 0-0 draw on our first game back after the Conference and a 1-0 defeat for Michael Appleton’s debut, the first of five defeats in a row, his messianic rise still incubating like a chrysalis.

Added to this are many forgotten opening day fixtures; Chris Hargreaves’ equaliser against Grimsby in 2005? Steve Basham’s winner over Lincoln in 2003? Gary Twigg’s goal against Forest Green in 2007? Pep Clotet’s debut at Oldham? What about facing Port Vale twice in two seasons?

The season opener is the most inconsequential consequential fixture of the season. It means both everything and nothing. It signals something and indicates nothing. It’s both memorable and pointless, offering only the dubious opportunity to briefly sit at the top of the table or stare at the relegation zone wondering just how you’re going to navigate your way to safety with just ten months and 45 games to go.

Portsmouth’s visit was hardly unfamiliar territory – it was the fourth time we’ve opened against them after a 4-2 win in 1987, 3-2 victory in 1993 and the aforementioned 2013 vintage that nobody calls, What’s the Story? Smalley’s Glory. 

Despite being unbeaten and flooded with goals, each one proved to be as reliable an indicator of future prospects as your average meme coin cryptocurrency. Despite the wins, we were relegated in both 1987 and 1993. And despite the goals, Dean Smalley’s heroics in 2013 and Billy Whitehurst’s brace in 1987 hardly signalled a season of glory for either.

It didn’t stop the familiar sense grinding horror returning when kick-off came yesterday. I sat and stared at my phone as it silently shared none of its secrets about how we were doing. Absence from a game doesn’t make the heart grow fonder, it means it swirls around you just out of reach, you can’t internalise and process the ebb and flow, you can’t pick out the chinks of light in the dark. You can’t reach your own conclusions.

Following a game from afar is like talking to a toddler on the telephone. You keep asking questions in hope of getting a response, but their silences could mean anything; they might just be nodding their head to each of question, they may have gone to fetch their mum, they may have burned the house down.

Saturday offered little by way of insight, seven minutes before half-time, Cameron Brannagan, of all people, played a blind back pass into the path of Colby Bishop whose shot rebounded off Cumming into the path of Adrian Segecic to score the only goal of the game. Perhaps we can be reassured that it’s not the kind of mistake Brannagan is likely to make again this season.

It would be easy to lose our heads bemoaning a lack of signings in key positions, the disruption of brand building in Indonesia or the distraction of Thursday’s planning meeting, but the game served mostly as a reminder that a new season isn’t a sweeping revolution. We’re evolving from the side which narrowly avoided relegation last season, so an opening day defeat signals little more than we’re still a work in progress.

I’ve said before, seasons start with all hope and no evidence and end with all evidence and no hope. The opening game simply marks the beginning and offers little about how it might end.