Cherries comment, by Karenza Morton...

"LIFE is a rollercoaster, you just gotta ride it," Ronan Keating sang in the not too distant past.

Thanks for the advice Mr Keating Sir, but if it's all the same to you, after last Saturday, I think I am going to find me a nice piece of flat ground and just reside peacefully there for the time being.

Rollercoasters, particularly those of the emotional kind, are NOT high on my agenda at present. I've rather ridden them to death in the last few weeks and quite frankly, my poor little ticker could not stand another one.

Have you ever experienced anything like that in a Football ground before? Sheer unadulterated, all-consuming emotion.

Not even the jobsworth stewards who insisted on sitting people in their allocated seats could ruin it. It was awesome. (Note to John Madejski - what works at a pop concert doesn't necessarily work in a football ground).

Whilst, I don't remember the 1987 championship-crunch match against Middlesbrough, I do remember Brentford away in 1995.

Both of those games would probably rate extremely highly on the "Oh my life! my heart has just left my mouth" scale but think of the Reading rollercoaster.

Think about how you felt at 3pm. And at three minutes past 3pm, 3.45pm, 4.43pm, and 4.45pm. I'd even go far to say think about how you felt at 10.30pm, but in all honesty, who was sober enough to actually remember 10.30pm?

So much emotion. So tangible. So superb.

I don't care if it's the old cliche; football IS a funny old game.

Footballers are normal people. They sleep, they eat and some of them even do their own ironing occasionally. Well, maybe not the last one but you get my point.

Yet we treat them like demigods. What they do with a round, spherical object has the power to control our moods, our feelings, our lives. They make us penniless following them around the country and they can break up marriages.

But sometimes they do things like score Wade Elliott's third goal and suddenly you remember why you opted to spend a perfectly lovely May afternoon having your blood pressure pushed dangerously close to boiling point.

Once Reading got their second, they were always going to get a third. It was as inevitable as opening the tabloids this morning and seeing a picture of Geri Halliwell.

It actually got to the stage when the score was still 3-2, that I wanted Wigan to score. At least that way, we would have had a scapegoat. Someone else to blame.

But no, those lovely Lancashire boys decided 0-0 was a much funnier result and hence we were left cursing every ex-Brentford forward in living memory.

At the time it was agony. And the site of the totally inconsolable Carl Fletcher would have been enough to reduce even Mike Tyson to tears.

But with hindsight, it was worth it. Okay, Cherries missed out on the play-offs but in the last six weeks, they have produced some phenomenal football and some mind-blowing excitement. To come so close was painful yet there are no complaints from this diehard.

On behalf of the 3,500 that were at Reading, and even the one 44-year-old librarian who opted to go and watch sweaty men wrestling instead of his beloved Cherries, thank you. It's been a pleasure.