As ramshackle and haphazard as they might seem sometimes, a professional sports club is a business and it's a business that deals in a single commodity – hope.
Teams are out there selling hope and they're selling it every minute of every day because if the fans buy hope they'll buy tickets and merchandise and television subscriptions and memberships and everything else that's on offer.
The club doesn't have to sell the hope that they'll win the competition or even make the grand final, because that's only realistic for a couple of teams each year, they just have to sell the hope that some day things will be a little bit better than they are right now.
It can be something as small as the promise of maybe winning next week, because sometimes a club is so low that's as big as their ambitions can be.
After the worst season in club history was backed up by five straight losses to start this year, the Wests Tigers were selling that kind of hope for their clash with Parramatta on Easter Monday. Given what they've dished up so far in 2023 it's understandable if few were willing to buy in.
Did they get you in end? Did you start thinking it was their day? Deep in your heart did you wish it could be, either because you're one of the joint venture brethren or just because you have Tigers fans in your life and you want it for them?
Late in the second half it felt like it was coming. Down 22-6 and looking done, they scored three straight tries to roar back to life.
New recruits John Bateman and Api Koroisau, who have toiled so hard for the last few weeks with little to show for it, were getting some results.
Junior Tupou and Asu Kepaoa, shining lights so far this year, were getting amongst it. Luke Brooks was playing his best footy in ages.
It felt like something was happening at Stadium Australia, that maybe they'd get a late one and win and we'd all look back at this Easter Monday as the day the second Tim Sheens era really got started.
It's nice to think things could have been that way but, of course, it went a different way. The harbinger of doom, late as it was, finally arrived in the last five minutes in the form of a wonky Parramatta dropout that Charlie Staines dropped over the sideline.
It is wrong to blame that one error for the loss. There's no guarantee the Tigers would have scored. Even with the Eels striking through Maika Sivo on the ensuing set, the Tigers had one more chance to level the game late, only to come up short.
Things like the Staines drop happen to everybody every now and then but when they happen like that, in that moment, it felt like something that could only happen to a team like the Tigers.
The 28-22 loss to Parramatta was not the club's worst performance of recent times – in fact, it was easily one of the better ones, all things considered – but it's another brick in the wall of misery the club cannot seem to scale, a wall which seems to grow by the week.
The numbers make for grim reading and with each loss they grow in the telling. The Tigers have lost 11 matches in a row and 18 of their last 19, dating back to last year. Brooks, for whom a change of scenery or a reprieve from first grade would be a mercy at this point, has not won a match at halfback since August of 2021.
A run of outs like that only make the spotlight brighter when other things go wrong and it makes it even harder to sell that hope because when you're stuck in the mud like this and when the harder you fight the deeper you sink, it must feel like you'll never get out. Losing Adam Doueihi for the rest of the season with an potential ACL injury would makes the struggle even tougher.
The Tigers have the bye coming up. A quick turnaround probably would have been preferable because at least they've got some stuff to build on from this game, where a win felt like a real possibility and not some wild dream that could never come true.
After a slump, wins rarely arrive fully formed – they're constructed, piece by piece, by what a team finds in the losses that preceded them.
That's how a revival is done, teams reach into the ashes of their past and find the little things upon which they can build the future.
But that's a tough sell. Especially after losing 18 of your last 19 and while you're in the midst of the longest finals drought in the league, a drought which is growing longer and longer with every passing day. Hunting for positives is lonely work and the longer it's done the harder it becomes.
This Tigers run of outs will end. One day – it could be tomorrow, it could be next year, it could be decades in the future when the memory of what happened on this Easter Monday is only retained in dusty books and in the minds of rugby league's greatest trainspotters – but one day they'll be winning games again. On a conceptual level, there is still everything to play for and forever to play it in.
But it's the waiting that makes it hard. How long can the Tigers faithful keep seeing more of the same before you've had enough? How long until you decide it's not worth the trouble? How long can you keep buying hope over and over again when it didn't work out so many times before? We want to believe in our clubs forever, but forever is such a long time.
