The back-to-school signs are up in supermarkets and the leaves are turning yellow and red as we enter the final days of summer.
With evenings drawing in, it's time to put away the snorkels and swimming togs for another year, wave goodbye to the outside and settle in for some comfort television. That’s where the Premier League has you covered.
While the drama and nonsense of the summer transfer window is becoming a bigger and bigger sporting circus with each passing year, it’s still just about playing second fiddle to the soap opera of the Premier League. And what a series there is in store.
With storylines aplenty, season 34 of the show formerly known as The Barclays promises more betrayal, heartbreak, and dramatic stare-downs than the last four decades of Eastenders.
We’re got new faces on the scene, returning heart-throbs, old favourites looking to reclaim faded glory and a couple of nasty villains out for retribution.
From an Irish perspective, Keith Andrews stepping onto the Square raises the biggest questions.
On the surface, he’s bounding into the managerial limelight with a swagger and a glint in his eye but he’s also a man with some skeletons in his closet and some powerful enemies lurking in the background.
Andrews has been handed an unexpected opportunity to take the reins of Brentford as his first managerial job. Having swapped the pundit chair for the hot seat, there are some murky figures from the former Ireland assistant's past just waiting for him to slip up and let them twist the knife.
Roy Keane, who famously said Andrews was up there with the 'biggest bullsh***ers’ he’d ever met, will be box office when the Bees first come under the Sky Sports microscope, with Martin O’Neill ready to get his digs in too, albeit from the less glamourous platform of TalkSport YouTube clips.
Andrews has a tricky task in replacing a genuinely transformative manager in Thomas Frank. With big performing players like Brian Mbeumo, Christian Norgaard and Mark Flekken all departing, he has a huge job on his hands, which is why the bookies have him down as the favourite for the sack race
If Andrews is the man likely to feel the early heat, Liverpool boss Arne Slot is riding on a crest of a wave heading into the new campaign.
Cantering to a surprise Premier League title win with Jurgen Klopp’s creaking squad, Slot has spent hundreds of millions of pounds bringing in new big-name players. With the chase for Alexander Isak still trundling along, Slot’s Liverpool could eclipse Chelsea for the highest ever transfer window spend.
Darwin Nunez, Luis Diaz and, tragically, Diego Jota all had to be replaced, but could it be a case of too much, too soon?
Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitiké, Milos Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong are already through the door and with the possibility of Isak, Marc Guehi and Giovanni Leoni following, that’s a lot of first-team players to integrate in a short time.
Home and Away fans of a certain age will still speak of the generational trauma that was inflicted on them when Pippa’s actress was recast overnight without any on-screen reference to the change.
Sudden breakneck upheaval like Pippa’s switch and Liverpool’s summer transfer window can take time to settle and a questionable second-half performance in the Community Shield already has rival teams wondering if they could be vulnerable in the early stages.
Manchester United, meanwhile can only look on at Liverpool’s summer turnover in envy.
As the Sky Sports News deadline day counter ominously ticks down, the Old Trafford club are still no closer to getting their high-earning deadwood off the books.
Marcus Rashford remains a United player, albeit one out on loan for the season at Barcelona, while the club have been unable to attract any meaningful interest in the rest of their bomb squad.
With Antony, Jadon Sancho, Alejandro Garnacho and Tyrrell Malacia still training separately and no closer to leaving than they were at the start of the summer, Jim Ratcliffe is looking more and more like a frustrated Peggy Mitchell trying to sling the drunks out at the end of the night screeching "get outta my club!" to little effect.
United have at least been able to bring in some new faces, albeit they’re now shopping among the second tier of available players following several disastrous seasons and a 15th-place Premier League finish.
Benjamin Sesko, Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha are the headline signings and they’re eager to add Brighton’s Carlos Baleba to their ranks. Decent players all with plenty of potential, but United have a habit of draining players of their promise and Ruben Amorim still has much to prove.
Meanwhile, having already spent £214million, after pleading poverty at Christmas time, you have to wonder just how much those tea ladies given the elbow by Ratcliffe were earning.
Across the city in Manchester, Pep Guardiola is hoping he can write his own redemption story arc after the wheels came off for the Sky Blues in spectacular fashion last season.
With old stars like Kevin De Bruyne and Kyle Walker being written out, City have undergone the kind of TV seasonal reset that you can only really have when you set fire to the pub or crash a plane into the village in the Christmas special.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Guardiola has stuck around for another go.
Between the winter transfer window and the current one, City have undergone a huge overhaul and while the signs were promising towards the end of last season, a poor start could see more questions being asked of Guardiola.
He should have enough credit in the bank with the club's owners to weather out any early storms but his increasingly tetchy press conferences and head-scratching antics last term hinted towards a man who could jump before he’s pushed if things don’t go to plan.
Jack Grealish knows just how changeable Guardiola can be when it comes to things not going his way as the most expensive player signed by the club has decided to cut his losses at the Etihad and high-tailed it to Everton.
Grealish’s move to the Toffees looks guaranteed to be entertaining, no matter how things go on the pitch and like all good soap opera pretty boys, Jack knows how to party.
The midfielder’s recent career trajectory saw him win the treble with City and then never quite find his way back from the celebrations.
Now he’s made the move to Everton and, with his first move, has taken the number 18 jersey in honour or Paul Gascoigne and Wayne Rooney. In fairness, both Gascoigne and Rooney were exciting, creative players, but both knew how to enjoy themselves off the pitch.
Hopefully, Grealish takes more inspiration from the sporting side, rather than emerging in a couple of years like a bedraggled and bearded Ian Beale. Should he find himself in a moral quandary or too tempted towards the call of the party lifestyle, in fine soap opera tradition, he can have a sit down in a laundry and a heart-to-heart with a wise old head who's seen it all before.
James Milner, the Dot Cotton of the Premier League, is now gearing up for his 23rd season as a Premier League player and looking back wistfully on all that’s gone before him. Speaking ahead of Brighton’s season opening at home to Fulham, it’s clear that Milner is starting to feel the weight of the years on his shoulders: "There are lads I played with at the start of my career whose sons I’m now playing with or against: Justin Kluivert, I played with his dad at Newcastle; I played with Bobby Clark at Liverpool and played with his dad at Newcastle; Tommy Watson’s girlfriend is Ian Harte’s daughter."
So as the new season kicks off with Bournemouth's trip to Liverpool tomorrow (Live updates on RTÉ Sport Online), with Milner slowly morphing into a sentient Shoot Magazine archive, Grealish trying to remember if he left his Gucci washbag in the Grafton, and Andrews eyeing Keane like a man checking for sharks in a pool, the Premier League remains the greatest soap opera we've ever seen.
