The football season has ended and, with no World Cup or European Championship, a football-free summer is ahead. A full summer without football. For some, non-fans, this is pure bliss. For others, it is a short-cut to insanity.
At first it seems a nice, relaxing little break. The play-offs wean you off the spherical goodness nice and slowly, then the next couple of weekends are quite pleasant. There's no biting of nails; no constantly refreshing web pages or Twitter feeds. There's no pacing up and down your front room, wearing a hole in your carpet. In short, there's no worrying. It's nice.
But then you worry that you're not worrying. Why aren't we worrying? It feels strange, almost alien, not to be wrenching your gut nearly every afternoon or evening over some game of football or other. Your brain, so used to working out, updating and hypothesising over ever-changing implications and permutations of results and formations, starts to feel under-used.
Yes, there's the Under-21 European Championship, to stop us all from going totally cold turkey before the pre-season friendlies kick in, but it isn't the same.
Saturdays become desolate places without the company of Jeff and company or, at the worst, Gabby Logan and Garth Crooks (well, maybe being without Crooks is preferable, but you get the point).
While we mark off the days to the first friendly, we do our best to tide ourselves over. There's FIFA, Pro Evolution and Football Manager to give us our fix. Hell, some of us even go out and play football. Actually play it. With a proper ball. On grass and everything.
However, until 3pm on a Saturday in August and our over-optimism sets us up for a gauntlet of worry and the inevitable yet crushing disappointment, we will be longing for the real thing. The proper football. The best distraction from the reality that there is other stuff - actually properly important and often frightening stuff - happening in the world.
Put simply, a world without football is boring and scary. Roll on August.
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