The coffee cups sit empty, a few crumpled chocolate wrappers around them. Two wine glasses and a couple of beer bottles still linger in the living room along with a television remote tossed to the ground in disgust as soon as the final whistle blew. This scene, I am sure, is more or less familiar to everyone the morning after watching your team get beaten in a big match on the television.

It’s the hope, they say, that kills you. The scarves and balloons dotted around the furniture, the club anthem blaring out of the bluetooth speaker and the build-up of nervous tension like a summer storm brewing in the Tuscan hills. And then, of course, disappointment.

The cruel might suggest that you should be used to it by now, following a team which has become a byword for spurning silverware. Yet somehow, despite all the glorious and not so glorious failures, you somehow keep the pilot light alive that one day they might some day shake off that tag and prove the doubters long. The feeling of warmth that would ignite after finally lifting a trophy remains a figment of only the most vivid imagination. Nothing, though, can quite extinguish it entirely.

Why do you do it, some ask, as if you could switch allegiance to another team but you know that long since ceased to be possible. The emotional investment is so significant by this point that it would surely leave you bankrupt if you tried to withdraw it and take it elsewhere. The heart has rarely been good at obeying orders.

So, instead, you have to fall back on whatever got you through the last time success slipped through your hands. You never expected them to win, they were the moral victors, there’s always next year – tell yourself anything it takes to take away the pain of failure. The trouble is, like squeezing lemon on your fritto misto, it always seems to find the paper cut on your finger. Some passing remark reminds you of the anguish you have just undergone.

It is only a game, of course, that much is true. There are much bigger matters in life than who kicked a ball into a net more often than somebody else and a sense of perspective should really be maintained. So you tidy up the coffee cups and wine glasses and put away the scarves and balloons until the next time they are needed. The trouble is, you have no idea when that might be.

Fans of giant clubs can be sure they will be served up another chance next season like a Nonna dishing out plentiful pasta portions to her grandchildren. For the rest of us, though, the lean times can be long-lasting and each failed attempt at glory might well lead to a wait of years or even decades. It only makes the bitterness of another defeat linger longer in the soul.

Dust yourself off, though, because there really is no other option. There’s a picture been doing the rounds of a little Fiorentina fan with a shirt carrying the phrase “I’ve got a lot of suffering in store!” – Ho Da Pati’ Tanto – on the back and that just about sums it up. The long, trophyless times can seem never-ending but it’s the only game in town so you just have to hope that one day things will turn and you might watch your favourites lift a cup. In the meantime, then, tidy up the living room, check that remote is still working and get on with it. One day, perhaps, you’ll be back dancing in the hallway in delight.