Football clubs, you see, are like good wives; it's all too easy to take them for granted, realising too little and all too late how we simply expected them to be there. In an ocean of confusion, a football club is that one rock we can cling to for comfort, even when we know it will dash us as surely as surrendering to the power of the waves. But even in its frustration and pain, it is, at least, consistent and above all, always there.
Melodrama? You might think so. After all, how many clubs have genuinely 'gone to the wall' in recent times? Doesn't someone always come in, even if at the final hour, to save them? Perhaps. But never, as my friend alluded, have times been as tough as they are now. Banks, let us not forget, don't go bust. Unlike football clubs, our financial monoliths were the genuine article - unbreakable. Oh how times have changed.
And this is the background against which someone, anyone, must raise enough finance to save a small provincial football club, our club, and rescue it from the jaws of maladministration.
Like dying, there will be a time for retribution. Now the focus is solely on survival - not on the field where our fate seems certain to be decided at Gloucester Place rather than the City Ground - but on earth. It's a time no fan can have foreseen; it's an event that, like murder, always happened on someone else's doorstep.
Former hero Mick Channon is aghast at the call for fans to dip into empty pockets and save their club. I am aghast at the prospect of foregoing what little pleasures we can all afford to do the same. But do it I will, and so will many of you. Because, despite our previous administration's attempts to portray us as nothing more than cold customers, we are in fact the warm heart of a magnificent football club that for over a century has defied the odds.
Not a big club and not a winning club, but a team which built its success in almost symbolic deference to the church from which we derive our name. How ironic that our origin, St Mary's, is now our undoing.
No footballer has yet been canonised, but in every generation we have seen a Saint rise from the humble origins of our modest home and stride the world in our name, like David to Goliath - Davies, Channon, Shearer and Le Tissier, not to mention CB Fry and countless more. In the world of football reckoning, there is no doubt we have done our bit.
And it is this that might yet prove our saving.
You see, contrary to the belief of some, we do not purchase our football club's wares. We do not shop in the soccer mall. We entered a relationship (some of us know not how or why) with an entity we came to love, sometimes above other, real and flesh entities. We willingly gave a piece of us to this entity and in return we endure an emotional bond beyond that of any businessman's understanding.
In this football club, your football club, I have invested not my money, but my life.
If you cannot feel this, they you have both my envy and my pity. For unlike me you have not wept tears of pain, but nor my friends have you wept the bountiful waters of joy, made all the sweeter for their rarity. If you have not invested of yourself, then either you are a liar or a fraud, possibly both.
Don't kid yourself. When people say it's only a game, remind them, so is life. If they still don't get it, they never will, just as an ant in Colorado cannot comprehend a beautiful Brazilian on the beach in Rio.
But feel it I am sure you do. And so do countless others like us. Not just of this club, but every club up and down our land and beyond.
Together, we can change football for the better. Together we can return football to the place it belongs, in the heart of the men and women whom it exists to serve - you and me. Not the audience in China, not the corporate sponsors or the media who carry our images. Football clubs exist for young men to express themselves before dreamers, dreamers like us. That they need and make money is an unfortunate happenstance.
Let us hope that among our supposed and potential suitors, the passion exists to save a fantastic club and restore it to where it belongs. Not to the top table of football, but to the bosom of a family. A family that believes in higher things and better things. A family that, despite its wayward sons, has stood for fairness and justice, has railed against odds and has been, above all, our beacon of hope.
Because in all my time as a supporter of this club, it is these traits and not our victories that make me proud to call myself a SAINT.