This summer, more than most, the return of top-flight football is a cause for rejoicing. Euro 2008 was highly enjoyable despite the absence of England and the presence in Austria and Switzerland of Steve McClaren, but being there watching other people's ecstasy and despair made me feel like a cross between a gatecrasher and an anthropologist.
Back home, we had plenty of sagas but far too little in the way of actual transfers: the proposed moves of Frank Lampard, Gareth Barry, Didier Drogba, Cristiano Ronaldo and Dimitar Berbatov took up far more space than all the pieces of actual news and only one of those deals has serious life in it as kick-off approaches.
The Championship and the rest of the Football League are a week old. Scotland, too. There were friendlies, the Community Shield, and the European qualifiers. But there's nothing like the top flight itself.
At least that's what I've been telling myself. But can reality match expectation? The skill will be there, the commitment, too. But will it be a competition or a procession?
Richard Scudamore and Peter Kenyon kid themselves and a few others that there's nothing wrong with the Premier League. There is, though, quite a lot that is right, albeit sometimes in a perverse way.
The fifth favourites for the Championship are four teams level on 14-1, according to one of the leading high street bookmakers. They offer 50-1 on Spurs, the fifth favourites for the Premier League, with everyone else in three or even four figures. Only in Italy, among Europe's major leagues, is there a similar split between a leading quartet and the rest on whom you are invited to waste your money.
Yet last season was, viewed in certain lights, highly competitive. The top four were separated by only 11 points, the lowest figure since 1996-97. Even if it was a case of the other three suffering slumps to bring them back towards Liverpool as the season reached a climax, there was still a three-horse race for most of the season and a two-horse race to the last.
Behind them, 10 points covered five teams between fifth and ninth, Everton just asserting their superiority as the line approached. The FA Cup winners were in that group, the Carling Cup winners were not.
At the bottom, Derby aside, the battle was even more intense. Six teams finished with fewer than 40 points and Wigan reached that target with only one game to spare. The survival of either Bolton and Fulham looked deeply improbable at times; both staying up was extraordinary.
This made for plenty of genuine drama and you didn't know where to look on the last day till Manchester United had a comfortable lead at Wigan and the focus could turn to Fulham's minor miracle.
The bands were close enough to be exciting and until Liverpool recovered form in March there was even some overlapping between them. Ultimately, though, there was no real surprise in the identities of any of the teams in these groups. Only Reading, by doing what had been expected of them the year before, Newcastle, by flirting with relegation, and Spurs, by slipping into the dead zone of mid-table, threatened the improbable (though Portsmouth's season as a whole was remarkable).
Every year, I pick over all 20 teams pre-season. I look at how they did last term, who've they've bought and sold, the manager and the boardroom, to try to offer a balanced view of a team's chances. The details of the forthcoming season - who exactly will win the league, who will go down, who will finish fifth - are often elusive. Our predictions about top scorers and flops always produce as much inaccuracy as success. But which band teams will fit into has become easier and easier to call.
This year, I want more and more of my expectations to be proved wrong. Kenyon and Scudamore believe that sport is about money; I think it's about dreams. These days, too few clubs have them in the first place - and if you don't have dreams then they can't come true.
Philip Cornwall