Taunton, 22nd September 2016

It starts at the railway station.

This has seen many things since the trains came to the south-west in the nineteenth century, but in the era of four day County Championship cricket it has seen nothing like this. Play starts early in September, so people's natural rhythms are disrupted. Earlier trains have to be caught, bags have to be packed more hurriedly, food and drink have to be procured. Getting off the 9.33 from Exeter is to enter a shuffling, mildly hurried serpent of humanity with one thing on its mind.

As always in circumstances where there is excitement, and anticipation, and tension, humour is never far away. There is plenty of laughter here, as people are optimistic about the outcome of this day's play, but uncertainty and trepidation take hold when they think of what might happen elsewhere. The problem is that nobody knows what will happen. And what happens will determine how they approach the rest of their cricketing lives. Either Somerset will have been County Champions for the first time in 2016, or it will have been yet another glorious failure in a recent history of glorious - and less glorious - failures. Nobody wants that, but the possibility is on everyone's mind and it will have to be confronted in due time.

The short walk to the station is hurried and suffused with chatter. This is a natural reflection of the significance of the day and the importance of comradeship. Nobody wants to face the possibility of disappointment alone or enjoy what seems likely to come today without the feeling that others, many others, are doing the same. There is, however, little chance of that.

It continues at the ground.

Walking to a seat in the Somerset Stand, the atmosphere is distinctive and intoxicating. As someone who was there, and who will never forget it, it reminds me of The Oval on another September day in 2005. The season is fading, but this is big, so big, that any sense of loss, whether literal or metaphorical, is postponed, at least until tomorrow afternoon.

As Rogers and Davies and Trego build the lead through the morning, and early alcohol is consumed, the level of noise among the crowd increases. 'We are all in this together' is what it says. And, as Rogers goes in at lunch with the latest, and what will transpire to be the last, of his seemingly eternal sequence of centuries, he is richly applauded. People know that he is a batsman of very high class, but more importantly that he is a good man whose presence at the helm of this side has been pungently influential in bringing them, and us, to where we are. For anyone who cares to notice, there is a valedictory air to the way in which he lifts his bat and salutes all the ground's corners. He has done this 76 times in all, but he knows that he will never do anything like it ever again.

For Rogers, and for us, though, nostalgic reflection is for the future. For now there is a match to win.

For the first hour or more after lunch, the attention of many switches to Lord's, where Yorkshire are inching towards 350 and a fourth batting point which will enable them to be champions if they win their game against Middlesex. With their score on 349-9, the players leave the field for bad light, then rain. The tension increases again, although Somerset hold the reassuring knowledge that they have more than four sessions to bowl out a Nottinghamshire side that will need to equal the highest score ever made to win a first-class match. For the away team's players, a sense of defeat has been in the air for days, if not weeks, and after tea, their slide is inexorable, their loss inevitable. No final day will be needed in this game.

For the next twenty-four hours the ultimate fate of Somerset's season rests in the hands of twenty-two of their fellow professionals - people they know, people they have played against and with, people they like, people they dislike - who are plying their trade elsewhere.

The Somerset players lap the ground. They are applauded by all and they thank those who have made this possible, even if it isn't yet clear what it is that has been made possible. It could be the most glorious of triumphs, or it may not. We, and they, will find out tomorrow.

Viewing this from the very back of the new Somerset pavilion, the sense of elation and pride is there to be relished, as is the view. It is the greatest thing that these seats now allow a panoramic view of northern Taunton and of the Quantock Hills, but something they also give is a broader view of the sky.

Big skies are more commonly associated with places like Nebraska or East Anglia. Here, so the legend goes, they can be unsettling in their way, but, while this is unlikely to ever be the case in undulating Somerset, they have different resonances. As the temperature drops slightly, and the altostratus clouds build in, the even, pale nature of the light emphasizes that autumn and winter are coming. Some of us will be back tomorrow, but most of us will be elsewhere until next season.

For many of us, this has been a day of days.