Worthing had never played this high before today. By full time they had beaten Carlisle at Brunton Park

By three o'clock this afternoon the English league season was under way at last, and it belonged to the fifth tier. By full time it had its first story. Worthing, a Sussex club playing the first game in their history at this level, came from behind to win 3-2 at Carlisle United, one of the division's great old names, in front of Brunton Park's opening-day crowd.

The rest of the opening card kicked off around them at three: Hartlepool and Barrow, Forest Green and Halifax, Boreham Wood and Tamworth, Harrogate and Solihull Moors. All of it National League, because nobody else in English league football is back yet.

The calendar did that by accident. The World Cup final was played on 19 July, and the top of the English game pushed its return deep into August to give its internationals a rest: the Football League comes back on the 14th, the Premier League the week after. Which left this Saturday, the first of the English league year, to the division of Brunton Park and Holker Street, of clubs that were once enormous and clubs that have never been anything but local.

Hold the Brunton Park result up to the light, because it is the first day in miniature. Carlisle spent the better part of a century in the Football League and, for one famous week in August 1974, sat top of the old First Division, above everyone in England. Worthing arrived from the Sussex and Isthmian reaches of the game, climbing season over season to a level nobody at the club had stood on before. At kick-off the table read zero played for everyone, which is the sport's oldest and kindest magic trick: a century of pedigree and a first-ever campaign weigh exactly the same. Then the game starts and finds out. Today it found out for Worthing, twice behind and winning anyway.

A season returning is time getting its shape back. From today until May there is a reason the weekend has a spine: somewhere to be, someone to be there with, a result to carry into Monday whether it deserves carrying or not. Allegiance is one of the few identities left that no employer issues and no machine can hold for you. Nothing whatever is produced by any of it, and it is among the best things we do. If you want to know what people do when they do not have to work, part of the answer happened this afternoon, at grounds where you can hear the manager, among people who would not have been anywhere else.

Elsewhere in today's paper we spend a long time with machines that pick the nation's shopping and software that routes its vans, and it is all real and all measured. But none of that machinery has any use for a Saturday. You cannot have a season fulfilled or a promotion delivered. The whole point is having been there yourself.

From here the ladder unrolls: the Football League on the 14th, the top flight the week after, and nine months of Saturdays between now and May, when this division sends one more club up through a final at Wembley. Somewhere in this afternoon's team sheets is a name that will be sung there next spring. After one day, Worthing sit above Carlisle, which settles nothing and does not have to. That is the first day's whole gift: everything after it is still to be found out.