With a certain anti-élan, last weekend Sunderland succumbed to a second successive relegation, plunging from the promised land of the Premier League, to the Badlands of League One in less than 12-months.
With a revolving-door system when it comes to their managers, Sunderland had been an accident waiting to happen for quite a long time.
There has also been a little bit of history repeating.
At the end of the 1986/87 season, Sunderland also took the forlorn journey into the third tier of the English game.
While they managed this fete in one season longer than it has taken the current generation of Sunderland players, it was perhaps an even more pronounced dip in fortunes 31-years ago.
When Sunderland were relegated from the old First Division at the end of the 1984/85 season it came during a campaign when they had also reached Wembley for the League Cup final.
In what had been an epic run, which had taken the Wearsiders past Nottingham Forest, Tottenham Hotspur, Watford and Chelsea, before facing Norwich City in the final, these had been cup exploits which had in turn had a detrimental effect upon Sunderland’s league form.
Already locked within a tense relegation battle, Sunderland hit the self-destruct button after their narrow 1-0 defeat to the Canaries at Wembley. A deflected winning goal and a missed penalty had conspired against a team which for so much of the season had seemed to have their name written on the cup.
Surprisingly, despite the glory going to Norwich, they too spiralled to relegation. However, whereas Norwich bounced straight back up to the First Division convincingly in 1985/86, Sunderland’s nosedive continued apace.
In the summer of 1985 the Sunderland board pulled off a massive coup. They secured the services, as manager, of Lawrie McMenemy from Southampton.
A son of the north-east, McMenemy had enjoyed his comfortable niche at the Dell, winning the FA Cup in 1976 and guiding them back to the First Division in 1977/78 had essentially made him bullet-proof on the south coast.
A League Cup final was reached in 1979, and they were runner-up to Liverpool in the First Division in 1983/84, a campaign when they also reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup.
McMenemy - a man who said no to managing Manchester United in 1981 - had built his Southampton side on a framework of talented youth products, allied to ageing legends. The theory being that the likes of Kevin Keegan, Alan Ball, Mick Channon, Mick Mills and Peter Shilton would pass on their knowledge and experience to the likes of Danny Wallace and Steve Moran, leaving McMenemy in the role of cheerleader, rather than coach.
It worked spectacularly and Southampton fans enjoyed a rich era of fine football and occasional near-misses on silverwear.
When McMenemy accepted the Sunderland job it was as the highest earning manager in the country. In a geographical area suffering the harsh reality of a working-class existence under a government led by Margaret Thatcher, it was an obscene amount of money to be goading Sunderland fans with.
Only immediate success would distract people from the financial headlines.
Sunderland lost their first five league games of the new season, and didn’t pick up a win in any competition until the 9th time of asking. The first of four successive victories, a corner seemed to have been turned.
By late-November, despite a lack of consistency, Sunderland had done enough to lift themselves to 12th position in the Second Division table. It was to be a false sense of security.
McMenemy’s side won just six further league games, three of those coming in the desperate final four games, as Sunderland scrambled to avoid a second successive relegation.
After the comforts of Southampton, McMenemy was being made to work for his big money and he was found wanting. Sunderland narrowly survived.
Drawing breath in the summer of 1986 as part of the BBC’s team covering the World Cup finals, McMenemy was blissfully unaware that his and his club’s fortunes would dip even further in the season to come.
Unable to get the type of performances out of experienced players like Alan Kennedy, George Burley, Eric Gates, Frank Gray and David Hodgson at Roker Park, as he did at the Dell from Keegan, Ball, Channon, Mills and Shilton, McMenemy fast ran out of ideas.
A 2-0 win on the opening day away to Huddersfield Town didn’t set the tone for the rest of the 1986/87 season.
A fortnight later Sunderland crashed to a 6-1 reversal away to Blackburn Rovers, with what should have been a heavy sense of foreboding.
By late-October however, McMenemy was busy papering over the cracks and Sunderland were 5th, after a 2-0 win at home to Birmingham City. He would win only five more games, before departing the club almost six months later.
A 2-1 defeat at home to Sheffield United in mid-April, in front of under 9,000 spectators, marked the end of the road for Sunderland and McMenemy. It had been a sixth successive game without a win, five of them losses.
With seven games to go, Sunderland turned to Bob Stokoe, the man who guided them to FA Cup glory in 1973.
Winning just two of those final seven games, Sunderland slipped into the end of season play-offs, where they faced Gillingham in the semi-finals.
A desperate two-legged battle took place in which they fought hard, in an attempt to maintain their place in the Second Division, but football once again conspired against the Black Cats.
A 3-2 defeat at Priestfield in the 1st leg still left Sunderland with the hope that they could turn the result around in the return.
An early goal conceded, at a vibrant Roker Park made the mountain Sunderland had to climb an even higher one, but fight back they did, with Gates scoring twice in the space of five minutes to put them ahead on the away goals rule.
When the up and coming Tony Cascarino levelled the 2nd leg score at 2-2, it edged Gillingham back in front on aggregate, and left Sunderland needing a goal to level the entire tie.
The goal eventually came, with just two minutes remaining, from the head of Gary Bennett and it took the game into extra time.
The celebrations were loud, but short-lived, as within the early minutes of extra time Cascarino struck once again, leaving Sunderland needing two goals to survive.
While Keith Bertschin managed to get one goal back, it was a frustrating and ultimately devastating final few minutes in which Sunderland slipped toward the Third Division.
An inconsolable Stokoe had failed to pull off the miracle of survival.
Forever scarred by his experience at Roker Park, McMenemy never again managed in club football, in 1990 teaming up as assistant to the new England manager, Graham Taylor, for another journey into eventual rancour, plus a spell in charge of Northern Ireland, before returning to the sanctuary of Southampton as a non-executive director, having also served the club as Director of Football.
The Sunderland fans of 2017/18 can seek some solace however, as within three years of the relegation to the Third Division in 1987, they were back in the top-flight.
Maybe history will repeat that part of the story too.
