Scenes from the world of Elite Sport: a pitch can’t be inspected because it is too dark, and a team without four players because of Covid-19 sit on the bus until they are told to go home early, exactly two weeks after being told to go home early from the very same place.

A pair of trips, the thick end of 450 miles on the road during a pandemic, eight minutes of football, no result and lots of hanging about in the cold. A team selected on Monday morning and ripped up on Monday afternoon. A side that’s completed one game since Boxing Day and is still top of the league.

A club living in trepidation about the latest round of tests. A bunch of people who are probably, like you and me, wondering what the hell is going to happen next.

And that’s just Carlisle United and their fixture against Harrogate Town, which may well even take place one of these years. We could easily pick out more examples from football’s land of absurdity.

So let’s. FA Youth Cup ties called off at a few hours’ notice when the competition is suddenly suspended, a few days after clubs riven by infections had to play youth teams in the senior FA Cup.

Managers managing remotely. “Self-isolating” becoming one of those injury terms to apply to players’ names in brackets, like (hamstring) or (groin). One club fined for breaching social distancing rules, a game of darts involving manager and players among the reasons.

Contagions bringing dozens of games to a halt, like United’s next three, each case the subject of official “investigation”. Sternly-worded letters and political mouthpieces advising players not to celebrate in huddles. Players going on to celebrate in huddles.

Empty stands, masked staff, spaced-out press (not in a good way), commentators commentating from the office, increasingly ludicrous fixture congestion. And, for bad measure, a 33-year-old reality television personality playing for an actual Football League club against a Premier League team.

You might think the game, in these extraordinary times, is completely off its tree. You would be right. You might think it should quit the pretence and close everything down. And you would also be right. And wrong.

Who, in all honesty, knows? Events listed above, as well as a few lurid others, surely render this the weirdest spell in all our football-supporting lives.

If we are being completely, bottom-line serious, watching it all go on, and it being allowed to go on when most of the country has forcibly gone home, is wrong – spectacularly wrong.

It is also, on other levels – some serious, some fun – massively right.

And it is fine to think like this, to be pulled one way and then tugged the other. To not know what is for the best. To regard football ploughing on as in some clear way offensive, but also still to derive from it the maximum levels of distraction and warmth.

Take it away and you return new levels of financial worry and potential blackout to another large sector. Remove it, and you confiscate one of the few remaining things currently providing mass, live (sort of) ongoing entertainment right now.

Eliminate each conversation about players and signings and tactics and results and when-will-Beech-fold-his-arms-next, and it’s one less reason to look away from the news and the overriding bleakness of things.

Take it all away, and also make the country feel a small percentage safer.

This is the moral debate and you will have to forgive me for finding it impossible to come down on a particular side. Sitting on the fence is almost illegal in this time of polarised, two-sentence opinion-shouting, but this is where it is perhaps safest to be when it comes to football at present. To enjoy it and not enjoy it at the same time.

There are occasions when you feel the modern game is drowning in its own seriousness, and all the elements of chaos we’ve seen are certainly shaking that up, making us realise it’s still a game, and so what if Aston Villa have to play the kids against Liverpool?

There are many well-grounded fears about the competitive integrity of leagues, both professional and part-time, which are either being misshapen without the prospect (yet) of extension, or stopped completely. At the same time, we are talking about the competitive integrity of kicking a ball around some grass.

Does it honestly matter that much? No. But also: yes.

Football remains a crutch for many. Its beauty in Covid-land is that it has given people something to hold onto. For some this winter it may have been the sparkles and swishes of Strictly. For others, the national game, the continuation of it despite all the barren bulletins about public health, is their sequinned escape.

Those who don’t feel the same way can be forgiven for resenting its every breath right now. Those working within it – like Chris Beech, who articulated many of its current contradictions after the floodlights went out in north Yorkshire on Tuesday – will continue scratching their heads and then getting back to the task of navigating 2021-football without anything resembling a map or a guide.

Truly, it is both exhausting and refreshing, essential and immoral, silly and important, a brilliant disgrace – and it is OK, perfectly OK, to throw your hands aloft and give up thinking what to think.