A Chelsea fan goes to the bar at Wembley, and the person serving says, ‘Your usual?’An old joke, I concede, but a decent one, and as timely as it has ever been. The trip to Wembley, which was April’s highlight, ensures another trip to Wembley, and our familiarity with the location only grows.

I make that 12 FA Cup finals since 1997 and when you add on the semi-final appearances and the League Cup finals and (for better or worse) the Community Shield trips… well, if they’re pouring your drink before you even reach the counter – indeed, if you have your own silver tankard up there these days – it would hardly be surprising.

Of course, some would say that our familiarity with Wembley has been artificially inflated by modern means. Should semi-finals really be staged in the same venue as the final? If the fabled ‘road to Wembley’ goes via Wembley, then doesn’t the whole journey fall a bit flat? And, by extension, does the value of the so-called ‘big day out’ inevitably diminish? The eternal debate continues.Speaking personally, my long-held view is that Wembley Stadium is an iconic environment which, by dint of history, holds a special place in the hearts and minds of all football fans, and therefore it should be reserved very carefully for the really special occasions on the calendar, such as Tyson Fury fights and Ed Sheeran concerts.

On the other hand, drifting away from the ground last month on a warm spring evening, with Crystal Palace efficiently overcome and the last rays of sun gently kissing the window of Wembley Park Nando’s, you had to admit the setting and the occasion were wreathed about with a unique romance.However, victories over Palace aside, I still maintain there is an awful lot not to like about the national stadium. Its travel infrastructure remains the least adequate of any major venue in Europe. The catering, which, straight after the stadium re-opened, enjoyed a rare honeymoon period in which cartons of surprisingly edible fish and chips were on offer, has long since reverted to the grimmest of baselines. And ruinous acoustics mean that all noise in the ground converts automatically and unhelpfully into a mush and disappears skywards.Also, any late afternoon sunshine converts the patch of seats behind the goal at one end into a tanning salon. And it’s all red inside, which is no colour for the interior of a tastefully designed football stadium.Nevertheless, despite all of the above, if the season offers a choice between going to Wembley three times and not going to Wembley at all, I know which option I prefer.

So, back north for the final we go – and taking with us, I hope, a spring in our steps and a glint in our eyes. Pride, indeed. For it’s important to have a proper historical perspective on our appearance in the final this year, and for this I invite you to go back 22 years.In 2000, Manchester United, who were then the FA Cup holders, unprecedentedly accepted permission to remove themselves from football’s oldest knock-out competition in order to take part in the inaugural FIFA Club World Cup, which they won.In 2022, our club, too, successfully took part in the Club World Cup - but didn’t remove itself from the FA Cup in order to do so, which, now as then, would have seemed an appalling act of desertion and an insult to the finest traditions of the English game. On the contrary, it honoured its obligations to that distinguished competition by competing in it so seriously that it is now in the final. Again. Different club, different attitude, I guess. But it’s something to have in mind when 14 May comes around.In other regards, April was the month of the see-saw. How do you even begin to reconcile a score and a performance like Chelsea 1 Brentford 4 with a score and a performance like Southampton 0 Chelsea 6? And at the same time, how do you even begin to equate a score and a performance like Chelsea 1 Real Madrid 3 with a score and a performance like Real Madrid 2 Chelsea 3? And yet all four of those games took place inside the first 12 days of April. Switchback barely begins to describe it.

It was also the month in which we once more appreciated football’s astonishing capacity to erase time – courtesy, of course, of the magic of the last-minute goal. Against West Ham, Christian Pulisic’s 90th-minute shot into the bottom corner had the supreme effect of absolutely obliterating the hour and a half which preceded it and enabled everyone practically to bounce out of the stadium in a state of euphoria. Only last-minute goals can do this.Yet it was the month, too, in which we knew the grave indignity of losing at home to Arsenal and merely drawing at Manchester United – scores which, in 2022, are so far below par for a team with our handicap as to be embarrassing.Alas, the first game of this month, at Everton, continued this trend. We seem to have become the team against which badly struggling sides who appear bereft of ideas, initiative and even hope itself, get the chance finally to galvanise themselves and turn it all around. It’s quite flattering, if you look at it one way, but at the same time I didn’t come into this season hoping to be the late spur to Arsenal’s then-fading Champions League hopes, let alone Everton’s chances of staying up, and I can’t have been alone in not enjoying the development of this little sub-plot in a period which has been complicated enough, plot-wise, already.Still, you could hardly call the lack of stability and the tendency to go up and down while simultaneously blowing hot and cold and breezing in and out, surprising. These past couple of months, our club has been obliged to try and concentrate while an unprecedented amount of noise is going on in the background – and increasingly in the foreground. It’s been like living next door to someone who’s having their basement dug out, except that they’ve also started digging out your basement, too, and they didn’t even have the decency to come round to tell you they were starting.Yet, despite the drilling and the banging, the thumping and the crashing and the permanent blare from scaffolders’ radios, here at the start of May it remains technically possible for this team to add the FA Cup and a certified top-four finish to the Club World trophy and the European Super Cup in its haul for 2021/22. In time, I imagine, we would look back on such a level of attainment, grasped in such circumstances, with some degree of amazement, and hand out praise in giant clumps where it is due. So let’s see how May goes.