There's a famous scene in the 1976 film Network when the embittered washed-up newsreader Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, cracks up on air and rails about his lot. "I'm a human being, goddamit," he says. "My life has value."
Broadening his attack into a diatribe about society, he exhorts his viewers to throw open their windows and shriek at the moon: "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more."
I couldn't get that monologue out of my head when driving home from Leeds United's 3-0 defeat by Watford in the 2006 Championship play-off final. Stuck in a traffic jam outside Oxford for hours, I resolved to divorce myself from the club I had supported for more than 30 years. Not to forsake it for another - I'm not David Mellor - but to live as a football voyeur, watching but not partaking - not a deserter so much as a conscientious objector.
Some friends thought it wasn't possible to walk away, pointing to the season-ticket books stretching back to 1976, the 1992 bond that we mugs forked out for to help build the grossly ill-proportioned East Stand or the shares in the liquidated plc that were worth less than the gaudy certificate on which they appeared. The prevailing attitude among those who proposed sticking with it was "it's our club not theirs".
But there was only so much of what the club had become that I could stomach. Take Kevin Blackwell, a decent man with the equivalent of an All Souls fellowship when it came to coaching qualifications. At the beginning he came across as a refreshing change.
He soon lost his lustre, though, apart from the highlights in his hair, and his "the summer I took over, there was just me, the tea lady and Gary Kelly" schtick quickly became as tiresome as David O'Leary had been when eulogising his "babies". Exiling David Healy to the wing, he soon lost his faith in young players and started packing his team with comically slow veterans such as Paul Butler and Sean Gregan.
On that Sunday at the Millennium Stadium, the promotions team had pulled out all the usual stops in their quest to make an "occasion" out of an already tense and exciting fixture. After a wearying two-hour pre-match hoopla from the on-pitch announcer, the teams came out and Leeds' on-loan midfielder, Liam Miller, looked so spooked by one of the sponsor's indoor fireworks that you knew Leeds would crumble before Watford's bombardment. I wish I'd had the sense to drive back then rather than sit and watch the abject and boneheaded display that unfolded.
It wasn't only that. There had been almost four years of financial trouble preceding that day and a further 18 months of it afterwards. So frequent were the crisis meetings he was required to cover, Sky Sports News' Bryn Law would have been better off living in a caravan on Gelderd Road. I used to have panic attacks just seeing his face in the hourly headlines segment.
It wasn't relegation that was the problem - in both instances it was deserved. Pity or mock Leeds if you want to, but there's no shame in their fall when you look at a cast list that includes Peter Ridsdale, Professor John McKenzie, Gerald Krasner and Ken Bates. The repetition, though, almost every week before a game against a perfectly respectable side like Plymouth, for example, that "to think it's only four years, three months and two days since Leeds were in the semi-final of the Champions League" did start to grate. How can you look forward when you cannot escape the past?
I stayed away for 18 months but you never really feel liberated. You huff and puff on the sidelines, obsessively cyber-stalking the club on an hourly basis. The 15-point deduction roused many to return but, although the misfortune of the Revie team in falling short so often made conspiracy theorists of most of us where the authorities were concerned, Lord Mawhinney didn't seem to me to fit the bill as the villain of the piece.
Defining oneself as a fan but refusing to go and see the team play was an odd predicament to be in. Part of you feels like a traitor, or worse, a part-timer. And if Leeds hadn't appointed Gary McAllister as manager in January that's what I would still be. In four months he has acted with the style, intelligence and dignity he showed as a player and it feels as though he's given us back a Leeds United that we can recognise. I feel like Al Pacino in The Godfather III when he lamented: "Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in." Back in for good, whatever happens on Sunday, I fear.