I'd forgotten how funny it was.

That's the first thing. Fever Pitch is 20 years old now, old enough – and good enough – to become a Penguin Modern Classic. But Nick Hornby's vision of being a fan chained to the club you support for life (in Hornby's case "boring, boring Arsenal", in mine Spurs) hasn't aged. It's still insightful and true, painfully so at times. Do you worry about when the best time to die will be? Before a season kicks off when you don't know how bad things will get? In mid-season when you already know that your team's not going to win anything again? Hornby did and wrote about it. I read it and realised I'd thought incessantly about that very question. Both now and back then when I first read it.

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