YOU always remember your first time.
And no matter what little hints about it you have garnered over the years, from friends who claim to have done it before you, or even the odd sneaky glimpse on television, nothing properly prepares you for the magical feeling of the real, personal experience.
That's the thing about Wimbledon. Even if you have followed it on the BBC for decades, once you get there at last you soon realise that the actual place is far bigger, more bustling, more colourful and glamorous, than you had ever expected.
Even the most polished politicians can be transformed into screaming madmen, think David Cameron and Alex Salmond's whooping and hollering as Andy Murray closed in on his historic 2013 triumph.
For those of us who have become fortunate enough to attend the event regularly, that fortnight of the Championships is the highlight of the year.
There's a red-letter day in late December, about the same time everyone else is buying their last Christmas presents: the halfway mark between that year's tournament and the following year's tournament really begins. No matter how dreary your circumstances or bleak the weather, you know at that point that escape is in sight. Then at last the fortnight arrives; it is a week later than usual this year but let us hope that the longer deferral of gratification will only make the tournament itself all the more enjoyable.
You don't even have to be a tennis enthusiast for Wimbledon to affect you this way. Indeed, you can think you might loathe everything about SW19 and its quintessential Home Counties Englishness, and yet once you get there you soon feel otherwise. For example, this reporter has seen hard-bitten hacks turn up cursing the editor who has diverted them to tennis from their usual football beat - and then sometime on day one start quietly to appreciate their good luck.
My own first time was in 1999. Not an especially memorable year as far as the two main finals went - Pete Sampras and Lindsay Davenport won those - but fascinating lower down the order, above all in the women's singles.
With a free choice of matches on the first afternoon, a couple of us opted to watch Martina Hingis, the top seed, play her opening match against an unheralded Australian teenager. An hour or so and a 6-2, 6-0 victory later, Jelena Dokic was no longer quite so little known.
Dokic got to the last eight that year, while another teenager, Mirjana Lucic from Croatia, made it all the way to the semi-finals. Having more physical power and just as much craft, Lucic looked even more likely than Dokic to go all the way to the top. Alas, domestic problems denied both the chance to realise their potential although Lucic, now 33, has reached the third round at two of the last three majors.
The one downside of Wimbledon around the turn of the century, the one nugget of nagging negativity, was the collective anxiety which the crowd exhibited when it came to their hopes of an elusive home success. In the decades before then, British spectators had become used to the feeling that Wimbledon was like a party where, although you were the host and had done most of the arranging for it, you were kicked out of the house before the fun began.
Then came Tim Henman, who reached the semi-finals in four out of five years from 1998. His relative success encouraged many to believe that a British winner was at last possible, that we would get to join in those games that the Americans and Germans had made their own. But, year after year, the pressure proved too much, most agonisingly in 2001, when Henman took three days to lose his semi-final against Goran Ivanisevic.
Born into a family in which generations had competed at Wimbledon, Henman was the archetypal English hopeful, and a heavy emotional investment in his cause was part of the reason why many of the more traditionally-minded fans from south of the Border reacted negatively towards Andy Murray during the early years of the Scot's emergence. They wanted one of their own to win, and Murray - like a good 95 per cent of the population - was not really one of their own.
You can still find the odd Murrayphobe at Wimbledon now, but they are a moribund species, small-minded and sad. The vast majority of the British crowd got behind the Scot as he embarked on his remarkable run of equalling or bettering his previous achievement every year in which he competed, all the way from the third round on his debut in 2005 to his triumph in the final eight years later.
That 2013 victory lifted a massive burden of expectation from Murray's shoulders. Last year the mild manner of his exit may have disappointed - he was curiously flat in losing in straight sets to Grigor Dimitrov - but in the wake of his back surgery, getting to the quarter-finals was probably as much as he could have expected.
So what of this year? Fully fit and close to top form, Murray goes into the tournament with at least as good a chance as he had in 2013. Wimbledon has felt like an even more magical place since he made his breakthrough, and there is no reason to expect a return to mundanity any time soon.
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