Who better than St Kilda in this darkest of AFL seasons?

St Kilda’s Paddy Ryder is chaired from the field after his 250th match after the Saints defeated Gold Coast at Metricon Stadium. Picture: Getty Images

There’s a streak of dark humour among fans of St Kilda, which is pretty much the only acceptable form of humour allowed among those suffering that affliction.

Supporting the Saints is basically a socially acceptable form of self harm. Moorabbin’s mob knows every silver lining comes with a dark cloud. They are a Russian novel passing themselves off as a football club, every season a long, cold march towards eventual disappointment. Occasionally there’s hope, but inevitably it kills ya.

Louis Armstrong may have played the most recognisable form of the club’s song, an apocalyptic gospel number popular at funerals, but something by Leonard Cohen would be equally appropriate. Nick Cave even more so.

Watch Footy LIVE & On-Demand Every Day from July 29 - August 17 with Kayo. New to Kayo? Get your 14-day free trial & start streaming instantly >

This year the league’s most entertainingly disappointing club is up and about after many years in the wilderness.

The Saints looked good on paper in round one, some thought they’d be an outside chance to make the finals, but here they are sitting second on the ladder. Anyone who wears the club’s colours should find this predictable.

The Swans are a smart, successful club. They’ve waved the bat once or twice in recent decades and they’ve shown impeccable timing by choosing 2020 as the year to nosedive towards the bottom of the ladder, picked a good time to blood kids and put money in the bank. Empty stands don’t get any emptier. The pioneering NSW outfit looks set to be back when crowds are back at the SCG in a year or two. Meanwhile they will fumble about off Broadway.

And the Saints? Well, they’re flying and their supporters have got this sinking feeling that this could be their year.

St Kilda’s Hunter Clark handballs during the Round 10 match against Gold Coast Suns. Picture: Getty Images

That’d be right, they say, this maddening mob will win the only premiership in our lifetime — the last was 1966 — and they won’t be there to see it.

That’s not to say fans aren’t revelling in this excellent outfit, a car assembled from second-hand parts that is fast, efficient and effective.

St Kilda has always revelled in its outsider status. Back in the Moorabbin days when Tony Lockett was eating pies delivered piping hot by the likes of Robert Harvey half their crowd looked like they’d been in the mosh pit at the Seaview Ballroom the night before. Which they mostly had.

The players were generally found at the infamous Saints Disco in variously compromised positions. In Matthew Hardy’s magnificent Saturday Afternoon Fever, an autobiographical account of the pain of St Kilda, he relates attending said disco with his brother and mate after Lockett won the Brownlow. The comedian, who’d been drinking Brownlow Medal Port and streaking down his suburban street, was stopped at the entrance by a doorman who indicated that like most establishments the disco had a dress code and it included wearing pants.

“As some restaurants provide ties for tardy customers, the doorman produced a pair of pants, which he said would see me through,” Hardy recalls.

Wasim Akram outed himself as a Saints fan this year; his affiliation can be traced back to a pre-nuptial agreement with his Australian wife’s father who agreed to the wedding on the condition the king of swing followed the football club.

While Shane Warne is the most high-profile fan, Eric Bana did his bit for the club by getting Judd Apatow to write his obsession into the film Funny People.

The scene where Bana’s character explains the 2008 final to Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen is bizarre and probably only amusing to Australians.

Bana goes on about “this little f...er” and “that big f...er” while wearing club colours, to the bemused Americans, one of whom is only interested in his wife. It is, appropriately, a dark comedy.

Nobody understands better than a St Kilda fan that it is the hope that kills you. That crushing lesson was reinforced a decade back when the side managed to play three grand finals in the space of 12 months and not win any of them.

But for the bounce of a ball ...

Hope, however, has returned and must be embraced. In Dan Butler they may have the recruit of the year, combining the running skills of Aussie Jones and the cunning of a Stephen Milne.

The fleet-footed forward is not the only re-engineered player exciting the faithful. The Saints picked up Brad Hill, Paddy Ryder, Dougal Howard and Zak Jones at the trade table in what looks to be the best shopping trip since North Melbourne’s Ron Joseph exploited a brief free agent period in the early 1970s to recruit Barry Davis, John Rantall and Doug Wade.

Jacks Billings and Steele were outstanding in the midfield. Their King twin, Max, shows great signs.

Best of all, in Brett Ratten the Saints have found a coach who not only knows how the team should play, he has somehow managed to get them to play that way. No small feat when most of them met for the first time a few months ago.