Reading photographs: Release

Hope has been a recurrent theme on these pages. But hope so easily melds into expectation. It's hard to think back to August, when we realised that the hope inspired by a strong finish and the building of a convincing squad had somehow coagulated into expectation.

We realised this over the course of about an hour after Richard Brodie had scored at Minchery on a sunny day in August, and the mood on the terrace gradually turned from disappointment, to frustration, to despair. We started to realise: we had thought this was our season.

It took three minutes for the world to change.

Several times this season we've experienced that moment when you exhale so hard that it's a struggle to breathe. We did it that afternoon, and this image shows Matt Green mirroring this. Pain and pleasure in one image, as something is released from within. It's a startling image, but in fact this isn't an image of Matt Green after scoring the first of two goals - the goal scorer is behind him. Mark Creighton, 'The Beast', is locked in fierce embrace with his centre half colleague at the time. It's the sort of embrace you recognise that again shows that dual pleasure and pain: the pleasure is heightened because you realise what you only just avoided.

An unlikely goal scorer, and an unlikely reaction.

And Luke Foster: we're coming for you. What we'd written before and never published seems somehow apt at the point we find ourselves now.

There'll be some other retrospective pieces on this season over the coming weeks. Thanks for reading.

[Image credit: Steve Daniels/Rage Online, and reproduced here with kind permission]