At last, the long wait is almost over. This weekend, after a drought of 13 weeks, the new football season kicks off in England.

Regular readers of this column might be bemused about my timekeeping, given that the World Cup finished less than a month ago, but international and domestic football are practically different sports. Allegiances are entirely different (players can be loved in one and hated in the other), the scale and commitment are different (supporting a team in the World Cup requires paying attention only a few weeks in four years, while doing the same for a domestic side is a full-time job) and the quality is different (I don’t think a single one of my domestic team’s players even had a run-out in South Africa).

What matters now is the stretch of 576 games in the English Football League Championship that will hold my undivided attention for the next nine months–an odyssey of highs and lows that begins in just a few days.

Every fan, of every sport, surely has a similar annual experience. At season’s end, the weeks seem to stretch out ahead. In the first few days jubilant fans, still drunk on the glory of a triumphant year, reminisce over what has passed while their counterparts–those whose teams were merely average or decidedly awful–do their best to forget.

Soon, however, both successes and failures are put aside, and as supporters find their weekends suddenly empty, the boredom sets in. Some dabble in other sports, hobbies or home improvement projects, while others use the time as an excuse to head off on vacation. But as distracting as these might be, they can never quite fill the gap.

The clock is steadily ticking down throughout all of this, and having satiated other interests, the fans slowly start turning their thoughts back to the approaching season. Here and there, real news starts creeping back into the sports pages: gossip and rumors about player transfers and fanciful predictions of the twists and turns in the action ahead.

And so begins the most exciting time of the year. Like a second Christmas, fans dare to hope that Santa has brought them that league-winning team they asked for. Teams rebuilt from both new and old players lie untested like well-wrapped presents. Journalists and supporters alike can perhaps rattle the box a little, with interviews and analyses of performances in pre-season friendlies, to try and discover what lies beneath the paper, but until that first game no one really knows what they’ve got.

Across the country it is the one time when every fan has reason to be hopeful. Despair and misery have not yet had a chance to gain a foothold and even recent history becomes meaningless. A championship-winning team could win again, or fall to pieces as egos clash, and, with a healthy dose of luck, a minnow could reverse its star-crossed fortunes and become a real contender. The league table is a pristine field of zeroes that has every team tied for first, and dead equal for last.

My hometown team, Reading FC, should start this season hopeful of a shot at promotion back into one of the biggest leagues in the World, the English Premiership. Out of the 24 teams in the Championship, three will ascend upward and three will be relegated downward. Barely six months ago the latter looked like it would be Reading’s fate, with an awful first half of the year putting a pre-season favorite all the way down to second from last. But a change of manager turned everything around, and it went all the way to the sixth round (quarter-finals) of the FA cup and finished comfortably above mid-table in the league. The only regret to the miracle was that had this reinvention happened just a few games earlier, Reading might now be preparing for a return to the top-flight.

There have been inevitable transfers in and out over the off-season, but the core of the team is ostensibly the same one that was drawing admirers only a few weeks back. But nothing is ever easy or pre-ordained in sports, and in a league often described as the most competitive in the world, it seems almost inevitable that there will be suffering to come.

At least for now, though, I can dream alongside everyone else.