"GLORYHUNTERS, are we?" the taxi driver quipped as he glanced in his rear-view mirror.
He was partly right: of the family group of five sitting in his vehicle, two of us qualified as such. My sister was seeing her first football match in nearly four decades. I was about to watch my first Falkirk game in nearly a quarter of a century.
I'd got out of the habit, long before then, of watching Falkirk regularly. The demands of work had seen to that. I dimly remembered what it was like to have been an enthusiastic fan all these years ago, when much of my weekend would be shaped by the Bairns' Saturday-afternoon result. A win meant that everything in the world was fine. The taint of a solid defeat, or a cup exit, lingered all the way to the Monday morning, like a persistent hangover.
But there we were at Hampden last Saturday, bumping into, or finding ourselves seated next to, friends and colleagues. I ran into an old neighbour for the first time since 1982. It was that sort of day.
It felt odd to be watching my old team play for the first time in ages but it felt even odder, having been accustomed to watching live games or recorded highlights on TV, to watch a game unfold without the benefit of an excitable commentary. I remembered something else from those years from my years at Brockville: the communal sense of anticipation, the rolling thunder of applause or jeers that periodically rumbled round the stands, the ritual abuse directed at the referee, the elation when we scored and the gloom when we conceded. (It was a shame when the ground was flattened, and replaced with a supermarket).
On Saturday, a thick dark cloud settled over us when we went behind to Caley Thistle; it was only when Falkirk rallied to equalise and suddenly looked the stronger team that it lifted entirely. The silence that fell like a cloak when Caley Thistle scored a late, unanswerable winner - spoiler alert - was as sudden as it was impenetrable.
Still, it was a great day out, with a fine, peaceable atmosphere. I'm glad we went. The more so, because football's surlier habits were coming to the fore once again: the epic corruption at Fifa, the brawl at Motherwell-Rangers, the alleged racist behaviour of three young Leicester players in Thailand. Nothing could ruin the afternoon, though - not even the private-hire taxi driver afterwards who, when asked how much it would cost to go to the city centre, replied, slightly opportunistically: "How much do you want to pay?"
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