There is a particular quality to a football season that has made its point. The urgency drains out of it like water from a bathtub, and what remains is something gentler — not less committed, but less afraid. Fifty points. Thirty-five matches. Three left. The table does not know that the Rovers are safe. The Rovers know.

At Haverford on the 12th, they played like a side that had remembered how to enjoy themselves. Osei’s opener, on thirty-one minutes, was clinical and cold — a low finish across the goalkeeper after Harte’s through ball split the Haverford centre-backs with the kind of weight that suggests the pass was delivered by someone who has been thinking about it since Wednesday. Dunmore’s second, on sixty-eight, was not clinical at all. It was a twenty-five-yard drive, hit with his left foot, that swerved once and hit the bottom corner with the sound of something being settled. Eighteen thousand four hundred at Haverford’s modest ground watched in silence as Dunmore jogged back to the centre circle without celebration.

Two-nil. Blackshaw won twelve aerial duels. Harwick, alongside him, won nine. The Haverford attack, which is honest and hardworking and does not trouble anybody very much, troubled nobody at all.

At Bridgewater on the 19th, Fernwich came and did what Fernwich do, which is defend in numbers and wait for someone to make a mistake. Blackshaw obliged, in the positive sense, on fifty-five minutes — rising to meet a Dunmore corner with the kind of header that has become, through repetition, a signature. Three goals this season, all from Dunmore corners, all headers. The man who missed the first three months of the campaign with a knee injury has, upon his return, discovered that the simplest route to goal is through the air.

Fernwich equalised on seventy-two minutes. Cahill, who has been steady all season but is not quick, brought down Theron at the edge of the area. The referee pointed to the spot. Theron — Fernwich’s twenty-four-year-old forward, who has been the best player on a mid-table side all season — struck the penalty low to Marsh’s right. Marsh went the right way but could not reach it. One-one.

Forty-two thousand one hundred at Bridgewater. Not a sellout, but not far from it — the ground has averaged above forty thousand for the last six home matches, a figure that would have seemed fanciful in January.

Osei now has sixteen league goals. She is third in the division behind Kessler (twenty) and Innes (eighteen). In any other season, sixteen goals from a side that spent the autumn discussing relegation would be the story. In this season, it is simply what Osei does.

Corbett, signed to her two-year extension and looking, for the first time this campaign, like a manager who does not expect to be fired before lunch, was asked after the Fernwich match whether she was satisfied with fifty points.

“We’ll play the last three properly,” she said, “because the table doesn’t know we’re safe, even if we do.”

Three matches remain. None of them matter in the way that football supporters use the word “matter.” All of them matter in the way that Corbett uses it, which is to say: properly.

It has been a peculiar and quietly wonderful season. A cup in February. Near-death in March. Eight matches unbeaten. A centre-back who scores from corners. A winger who scores from everywhere. A manager who was not wanted in autumn and is now signed through 2028.

Fifty points. Three left.

The bathtub is nearly empty, but the water was warm.