You'd have every reason to think I am completely insane.
Perhaps I am.
I'm going to ignore this brief window of introspection though.
After all, passion can manifest in a multitude of silly ways.
Like flying to the other side of the world on a moment's notice (OK, four days' notice) for a football match between Southend United and Oldham Athletic — two clubs you've likely never heard of — in the National League promotion final at Wembley Stadium, London.
That's England's fifth-tier competition — these clubs finished 97 and 99 rungs down the ladder from Premier League winners Liverpool in football's meritorious hierarchy.
A bloody long way from where I was 72 hours earlier in Brisbane, Australia.
That's right, somewhat inexplicably, I embarked on a 33,072-kilometre round trip, with an absurd amount of anxiety and stress, and spent, quite frankly, an eye-watering amount of money for a single football match.
So I tell myself to try not to think of the money. Heavens, don't do that.
And certainly don't pause to think of what this does to your carbon footprint, which must be growing ominously like a boot's shadow over a hapless bug.
No. Because as much as your rational self knows this trip is lunacy, your heart tells you that it is essential.
On Wembley Way, English football's very own yellow brick road but miles from my own land of Australia, there was vindication for my madness.
Instead of thinking about why you shouldn't be there, you remember the photo from the game before that sparked this insanity.
You think of the crowd of men and women in the process of leaping to their feet as one, roaring in ecstasy like some primal, human explosion.
You think of the two men in mid-scream at the heart of that photo — your brothers.
You think of the man top left — one of your oldest friends, mouth open, leaning forward as he gets to his feet amidst the surge of emotion of those around him.
You think of your niece, representing her school team in one of the curtain-raiser matches on such hallowed turf.
You think of the focus of their joy, their club — my club — inexplicably making yet another comeback to surge into a Wembley final.
The club that little over a year ago should probably have been wound up by the courts, 118 years of history extinguished by a judge very reasonably acting in the interests of any number of creditors who deserved their dues.
And Southend fans had reason to fear because as any Bury fan will tell you, history means nothing when the creditors come calling and the apathetic authorities stand aside.
That was your club that was being run into the ground.
Your club has not only been a driver of your formative years, but a club that has nurtured and nourished generations of supporters since 1906.
Your family. Your friends. Your city. Your club.
Rationality is a meaningless irrelevance in the midst of such powerful emotional blackmail.
Football's lifetime of passion
Let's rewind a bit because none of the above has a hope of making sense without some much-needed context.
Much like many young kids in England, I was afflicted by the national obsession that is association football.
Juvenile flirtations with the mega clubs of the 90s Premier League eventually gave way to the novelty of going to see my local team live, just down the road from my high school, as a teenager.
The mockery directed towards my match-going friends for supporting a downtrodden club was replaced by an admiration for the depth of their faith and the lengths to which they would go to follow this ragtag group through the lower leagues of English football.
Roots Hall, Southend United's dilapidated home, became a weekly focus, its floodlights resembling a quartet of iron sentinels standing guard over the flimsy dreams and misguided ambitions of so many Saturday afternoons and Tuesday nights.
So many hours spent uncomfortably in the cold under its semicircular iron roof, staring at the verdant patch of grass that even to a child looked smaller than what I expected from TV.
So many trips around the country to stadiums big and small, from Carlisle to Swansea, and just about every town in between, with my oldest friends Alex and Paul.
Despite happily living on the other side of the world, the absence of those connections carved out during the shared experiences of youth is a lasting sore on any expat.
And so many of those experiences, for me at least, were cemented through adventures with this football club.
And yet this football club's very existence has been under threat.
This side that flirted with the upper tiers of what is now known as the Championship in the early 90s, a team that held the then-European Champions Liverpool to a 0-0 draw in the FA Cup in 1979, a team who, on its last foray up the league pyramid beat Manchester United in the League Cup in 2006.
From those heights, the club has plummeted.
Successive relegations and several winding-up orders put the club out of the football league and into the fifth tier.
A laboured and protracted sale of the club had the National League enforce an unprecedented 1 million pound bond on the club to even play in the league this past season, as it enforced yet another transfer embargo on the club pending its eventual, belated sale to a consortium led by Australian Justin Rees.
Oh, ye of little faith.
As Southend manager Kevin Maher wrote in his match program notes for this final: "12 months ago and we didn't know if we'd even have a football club.
"You've been through some of the worst a football supporter can."
You got that right.
Despite that troubled start to the season, Southend repeatedly took thousands of fans home and away across the country, from Gateshead to Nailsworth, Boston to Yeovil.
And then, claiming the last play-off spot in the final game of the season, proceeded to come from behind to beat both Rochdale (4-3 after extra-time) and Forest Green Rovers (2-2, 4-2 on penalties) away from home.
Oldham's 35 years of pain
Two teams had their stories played out in north London on Sunday and Oldham's is no less befitting a mammoth journey.
The Latics have had their moments of pain and anguish over the three decades since they were one of the foundation teams of the Premier League.
In its owner, Frank Rothwell — a man so delightfully northern that even his blood cells probably have their own flat caps — Oldham has a genuine fan who has the exceptional distinction of raising millions of pounds for charity and is committed to using his fortune to raise his town up.
"The only thing I want to do with the rest of my days is help to make Oldham a better place for everybody, and that doesn't just mean taking our football club back into the League," Rothwell told the Mirror, heralding Oldham Athletic as a vehicle to help integrate the 30 per cent Asian population of the town.
"We are breaking down barriers in our town. Oldham Athletic is going to be a force for unity."
A local man done good, Rothwell is spending most of his later years completing increasingly arduous challenges to raise money for charity — he twice solo rowed across the Atlantic Ocean in his 70s and has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro — as well as saving the Latics.
"Getting Oldham Athletic back on its feet has been the hardest [challenge I've done] by far," he told the Mirror.
"The place was feeling a bit sorry for itself and its very existence was on the line.
"We were so close to extinction the coroner was on stand-by."
A first promotion in 35 years, arresting the inexorable slide from the top table to the basement, would be the crowning glory.
It's not about the result
Sunday morning. Thin sunlight shining its unforgiving rays on a largely deserted, dilapidated high street in Southend.
It's seen better days, as has much of high street UK in the era of out-of-town retail centres and internet shopping.
Would the smattering of people currently ambling along it be dreaming that, come 5pm, this day would rate as one of the football club's best?
Those people in Southend United's blue shirts cast knowing glances at each other, wry smiles filled with optimism, hope, fear, excitement, and every possible emotion, as over 30,000 make the pilgrimage to Wembley.
Thousands on trains. Thousands on buses.
Wembley, when we get there, is a sea of blue — either the navy hue of Southend or Oldham's cobalt.
A record crowd, 52,115 (this is England's fifth tier remember) all singing and dancing and roaring their charges onwards.
Southend fans unveil a tifo as revealing as anything the club has been through over the last few years as the players run out amidst the pageantry and pyrotechnics at England's footballing cathedral — "NEVER GIVE UP" written large below the silhouette of a young fan who helped tidy Roots Hall during the club's darkest moments.
Tell yourself it's not about the result as tears prick at the corner of your eyes at this reminder of the club's defiance.
Sure, keep telling yourself that, a desperate attempt at self-preservation over this foolhardy venture.
Keep telling yourself that when Southend takes the lead inside the opening 10 minutes and the southern half of Wembley erupts, strangers hugging each other across the aisles.
Keep telling yourself that when Oldham equalises from the penalty spot just after half-time.
Keep telling yourself that as the teams play out nine excruciating minutes of injury time before the torture begins anew with 30 minutes of extra-time, in which Southend retake the lead almost immediately after kicking off.
And keep telling yourself that after Oldham score twice within a minute to ruin your dreams and crush your spirit.
The thing is, I think I probably believe it.
This will be more difficult to grasp for those who don't believe, but the result is only a small part of the journey — while success is welcomed with open arms, few embark upon a lifetime of supporting their local lower league club with expectations of glory.
And the journey for these Southend United fans was about so much more than victory in a one-off game.
This is about the journey this community has been on over so many years, where hope and belief have been so painfully hard to come by.
A community that has been dumped on and come within a hair's-breadth of extinction, saved only by a moment of benevolence and having the chance to experience this moment of togetherness, and so many others, saved.
Even the act of coming together for this moment by the communities of Southend and Oldham was polluted and threatened by the organisational incompetence of the National League, Wembley Stadium, Transport for London and Brent Council.
With planned engineering works at Wembley Park station, authorities had capped the attendance at Wembley at 35,000, a figure circumvented by the hiring of convoy coaches by the clubs and constant lobbying from club staff and politicians from both Essex and Lancashire.
The 52,115 that were in the ground made this the highest attendance ever for a National League play-off final.
No matter what obstacles were put ahead of these clubs and their supporters, they were still there.
We were all still there. More than 50,000 of us from two clubs on the brink a matter of years ago.
"What is a club in any case? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it," former England manager Sir Bobby Robson said of his beloved Newcastle United.
"It's the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city.
"It's a small boy clambering up the stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father's hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him, and without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love."
That's what made this trip worth it.
