Football’s back. Just a new royal yacht away from the morale of this great nation being fully restored.

Maybe it would be different if I’d been furloughed. Or if I was working from home. Or if I was home-schooling kids – or, perhaps most pertinently, if I was still a kid. Or if I supported a team – Liverpool, say. But, as listening to the first ten minutes of Man City v Arsenal confirmed, football behind closed doors is no escapism. Rather, the eeriness of it all is a stark reminder of lockdown, and every VAR controversy is a reminder that the same levels of scrutiny could be better applied to our incompetent government.

Maybe, in those first intensely fretful weeks of lockdown, the return of Big Football wouldn’t have felt such an offensive example of warped priorities if I hadn’t been more worried about my mum, over 70 and undergoing cancer treatment.

The last thing I wanted to listen to was 5live or any podcast concerned with when football might return. Stop with all the pointless speculation. It’ll come back when it’s safe.

Except it won’t. There’s too much money involved. (Yet curiously not enough to share around while the covid storm is weathered, safe in the knowledge that more – so much more – is guaranteed once normal service is resumed and the football gravy train resumes its stratospheric journey.) “The game’s gone” has been a constant refrain during the Premier League years, but unnecessary away kits and impractical kick-off times, for example, never turned me off to the extent that the financially-motivated rush to complete the 2019/20 season has.

So here we are. It’s a highly personal choice and is no criticism of those for whom any football is better than no football, but, for the first time since forever, I haven’t been following the football. It’s not for me, Clive.

It helps that it sounds like I haven’t missed much – who knew that fitness and rhythm would have been hampered by a 100-day hiatus, or that football with no crowd would be so stale? – but I haven’t missed it one bit.

I joked the other day that lockdown had cured me of my terrible addiction to fantasy football. Add the breaking of the breakfast habit – itself a relic from the days of checking page 312 on teletext – of reading the transfer gossip on the BBC website, and I’m starting to wonder if that “fantasy” should be in brackets.

Is this the end of the affair? Did the 1983 sticker album mean nothing? The 1986 Everton kit. Neville Road rec. Mexico 86, Italia 90. Gary Lineker. Keith Houchen’s diving header. Cambridge United at Wembley. All those games at the Abbey – and a fair few at Portman Road. Euro 96. Morley, Cambridge Crusaders, the Don Boys. Olds v Youngs at Luard. World Cup Barns, the football WhatsApp group. All that mean nothing? And, besides, football has never been so good. Liverpool have been amazing this season. Last year’s Champions League, final apart, was insanely dramatic. England even avoided stinking out the last World Cup. Anyway, what about watching the Euro 96 replays on the ITV Hub? And all those nostalgia-filled podcasts? And how good have those kick-abouts in Lode been? 21 keep-ups with a lime the other day at work.

No, this isn’t how it ends, if it ever will. Covid will pass. All things pass. I’ll be back, football. And so will you.