It’s 5 August 2017. It’s hard to tell how many Cambridge United fans have made the trip to Exeter City for the opening game of the season. The records say 318. It didn’t seem that many at the time.

Exeter have chucked us in the main stand in the corner – not because they thought our ultras would make it feel like a U’s home game if they put us behind the goal, but because the away end is a building site. Just some hoardings, some sand and a digger. It’s very League Two.

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There’s optimism. It’s sunny and we’ve signed nine players. I’ve even heard of two of them. Shaun Derry did a decent job steadying the ship the season before. This could be our year.

That optimism lasts five minutes. Exeter lump a ball into the box from the halfway line and our left-back rises into the sky and punches the ball even further into the sky. Penalty.

Our new veteran goalkeeper David Forde saves the pen, but he’s of an age where getting up isn’t going to happen anytime soon and their striker slots in the rebound.

Fifty minutes later and a lone voice screams: “Derry Out!” Fifty-five minutes into a 4,140-minute season seems early to call for the manager’s head.

With 15 minutes to go and the game meandering towards an inevitable 1-0 defeat, I start looking at the fans around me. Why are any of us here? Not in an existential way – just why are any of us here in Exeter? What possible reason is there for spending six hours on a coach, in a car or on two trains (plus the tube), at a cost of hundreds of pounds, to watch this before doing the same journey back?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cambridge United manager Shaun Derry applauds the travelling Cambridge fans after his teams 1-0 defeat to Exeter. Photograph: Graham Hunt/Prosports/Shutterstock

This very crisis will hit a number of football league fans at some point on Saturday afternoon. Buoyed for no particular reason after a summer when virtually nothing has changed – the close season acting as football’s Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones trawling through Rotherham, Wycombe, Gillingham and everywhere in between flashing that big stick at us so we all just forget what happened last year.

Objectively, there is no reason any of us do this. The Championship might occasionally be different, but below that the football is rarely great. It may not be the only form of entertainment that sometimes falls flat. Some films are bad, but at least someone has watched them beforehand and decided they’re worth putting in the cinema. No one watched Cambridge United v Cheltenham Town in the LDV Trophy 17 years ago before I spent my evening enduring it, with all the fans baying for a golden goal for either side in extra time just so we could all go home.

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And this season for Cambridge is over before it’s even begun. Wes Hoolahan – an international footballer – was on trial in pre-season. Or more accurately, Cambridge were on trial during Hoolahan’s pre-season. And we didn’t make the grade. Fans of bigger clubs will have no idea how exciting it is to think of a real life international wearing your club’s colours, even if he’s retired.

Nevertheless Cambridge fans will go to Bradford on Saturday. Service stations will be filled with supporters of various clubs passing each other, sharing Dyson Airblades and paying way too much for a two-litre paper cup of 200 degree Costa coffee, as they begin another 10 months of boredom, lows, pain, tempered very occasionally by just a tiny bit of excitement. The odds of a genuinely enjoyable season are slim at best, if, as you really should, you define enjoyment as a “good natured” pitch invasion at the end of it all.

Ten teams will be promoted – then add at the most six teams who miraculously survive a desperate relegation battle. That leaves 56 Football League teams where the best case is nothing happens, and the worst case is false hope or relegation.

Yet I don’t envy die-hard supporters of big clubs. The reality will never meet the constant expectation. When your expectation is zero, you can’t be disappointed.

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And the real enjoyment doesn’t often arise from what happens on the pitch. The football itself is often a meaningless irrelevance to the routine of it all – who you go with, who you sit or stand with, what you listen to before or where you drink afterwards.

The problem is I take it for granted I can always go back, that Cambridge United will always be there. And the real danger is that might not be true.

Bury’s season will not start on Saturday. Their owner, Steve Dale, again failed to provide evidence he has the money to pay the club’s debts and ensure it is able to field a team. After getting promotion to League One against all the odds, how devastating their whole future is in the balance – and they are by no means the only club fighting for survival.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bury’s season will not start on Saturday. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

You do wonder quite what a “fit and proper persons test” actually entails. Perhaps the truth is there aren’t enough fit and proper people prepared to own a football club. Any genuinely fit and proper person would most probably look at the potential downsides of owning a football club and decide against it.

There aren’t enough benevolent millionaires just waiting for the opportunity to lose all their money. Anyone famous who’s even come near Cambridge has at some point been rumoured to be buying our club – Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, even Jason Donovan at one point. But I can’t complain. We are a going concern. We exist.