Thirty-one years ago, Everton lost at home on the opening Saturday of the League season. Not to a last-minute goal that should have been disallowed but which thanks to the madness of the current offside law had to stand, with a linesman unsighted by the time he felt FIFA would deem a player to be active. No, in 1977 Everton were beaten 3-1 by newly promoted Nottingham Forest, who had only come up on goal difference.
In its way that is the classic opening-day match, because what happened next shows how much, and how little, can be read into the first game of a campaign.
By mid-April 1978, Brian Clough's Forest were champions with games to spare. They won the League Cup, too, at the time when it was taken seriously (between 1978 and 1984, only once was it won by a side who did not also become League or European champions the same season). That win at Goodison was no flash in the pan, of the kind that in 1974 had helped Carlisle top the table three games into their first and only top-flight season.
On the other hand Everton recovered rapidly. Bob Latchford scored 30 goals that season and Gordon Lee's team only lost second place to Liverpool in the last month of the season. In other words, it was only in retrospect that you could fairly judge the importance of what happened that August afternoon.
Fifteen years later, Nottingham Forest won the first Super Sunday fixture of the inaugural Premier League season, 1-0 at home to Liverpool. Suspicions about Graeme Souness's side - that not enough had changed from the season before - were unchanged bu the defeat, but victorious Forest were in fact on their way to relegation. We discovered rather more about Sky that day, such as the needless innovation of showing us a League table after one match.
Not all of football's cliches are true - eg "decisions even out over a season" - but "you don't win the league in the autumn, you can only lose it" largely holds good. Poor results and performances matter more than good ones and managers under the greatest pressure are most affected if they cannot snap out of a pattern carried over from May.
Pete Gill's Winners and Losers goes into some of this in more detail, but Liverpool's second insipid display in a week, in victory, is as likely to prove significant as threadbare Everton losing. West Ham making hard work of beating Wigan at home, despite being 2-0 up in 10 minutes, likewise threatens to repeat an unwanted pattern and in a couple of months may seem more telling than any of the weekend's defeats.
But we've had one game. If there was one moment over the weekend that made me want to bang my head against a brick wall, it was Richard Keys and Andy Gray laughing at the fact that the bookmakers had knocked Manchester United down to second and Chelsea were now favourites. For Sky presenters to giggle at others reacting to things prematurely, when before the advent of Keys and Gray football coped without League table for three matches, made me pine for a more patient age.
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One double correction to my pre-season previews: I failed to take account of the postponement of Manchester United's game with Fulham on the last Saturday of the month, caused by the European Super Cup.
So now United's opening run can be made to look harder still. But they will still get to play Fulham at home some time.
Philip Cornwall