According to the most recent data, people in Scotland can anticipate enjoying life expectancy from 76.5 to 80.7 years.
For those of us with a lifelong football affliction, subjected to our first games before we have attained the agency to object, that translates to seven decades of following our chosen clubs.
At 38 games per league season, plus a handful of cup ties each year – and throw in the odd European campaign, for those lucky enough – that weighs in at comfortably above 3,000 matches to be stored in our memory banks.
Free yourself some space, and exit this one without saving.
They cannot all be classics. We invest such huge portions of our finite time to this pursuit not in expectation of weekly thrills and spills, but in order that we may be there when the incredible happens.
The greatness of the game is in the edited highlights package left behind in our minds.
But equally – mercifully – nor are they all as moribund and inevitable as last evening’s.
Into each life some rain must fall, observed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; some days must be dark and dreary.
Had Longfellow not long since reached his own three-quarter-century and passed off into the hereafter, even he might have struggled to convince Pittodrie’s repining patrons that the sun still shines behind the clouds as they traipsed through the exits, reflecting on another wasted ninety minutes.
Opportunities for those clouds to break will certainly come in the weeks ahead, and should they do so these labours will be, as they surely deserve, forgotten.
But as the slow slide down the table continues, poetry is just about the only place left where optimism for this Dons side resides.
In physical, observable reality, the hopes of their youth are falling thick in the blast.
Aberdeen left stunned by late Kilmarnock winner at Pittodrie
