Roughly 10 seconds into ITV's coverage of Brighton v Newcastle it cut to a montage which included Clive Tyldesley screaming "The FA Cup is alive and well!" And so began a January ritual that has become as familiar as sweeping up pine needles and sweating out the norovirus.
You will be familiar with the narrative. The pictures of flipped-up seats from windswept grounds, invariably Ewood Park or the DW Stadium, and the articles fretting over the future of "what was the greatest Cup competition in the world".
Then the deeper, more invasive, probe: the fears over slip-sliding attendances, and the fury that the FA sold what's left of its soul to a brewing company whose lager is weaker than a post-match softball to Sir Alex Ferguson. And the greatest worry of all: that the timeless romance of the 141-year-old competition has become little more than a half-hearted peck on the cheek.
Yet while the FA Cup has suffered a painful dent or two, often due to mistreatment by its careless owner, what's surprising when you dig into the archives is how little it has changed.
Take FA Cup attendances. If you're of a mind to add up the crowd figures of all 1,628 FA Cup matches played between the 1980-81 and 1989-90 seasons – and, yes, this writer was – you'll find that 20,714,856 fans went through the turnstiles over the decade, an average of 12,724 per game.
During the 90s that figure dropped slightly to 12,399, while from 2000–09 it popped up again to 12,792. And, judging by the figures since 2010, those numbers are unlikely to change radically in the coming decade.
So across over 30 years, the average of people watching an FA Cup has remained – cue sound of a discordant trumpet – broadly the same.
Of course those numbers need to be put into context. Attendances in England have been drifting upwards since Euro 96, while the Football League reported in 2010 that crowd figures had reached a 50-year high. But that doesn't negate the fact that the appetite for Cup football remains healthy – as anyone at Luton, Macclesfield or indeed Manchester City on Saturday will testify.
Another myth surrounds the Cup's supposedly fading romance; the concerns that there are fewer exploits of butchers, bakers, candlestick makers to revel in during the modern era. True, no top-flight side has lost to non-league opposition since Coventry against Sutton United in 1989, but the number of shocks has remained remarkably constant in the past 30 years.
The figures are startling only in their uniformity. Between 1980 and 1989, top-flight clubs lost to lower-league opposition on 60 occasions. Between 1990 and 1999 it happened 63 times. From 2000-2009, 62 times.
But what about the incidences of top-flight teams losing to teams in the old Third Division (today's League One) or lower? Well, they have barely changed either. Between 1980 and 1989 there were 19 such "shocks". From 1990-1999 there were 17. And from 2000-2009 there were 18. So far the pattern is continuing in this decade, too.
That's not to say the FA Cup hasn't changed. Of course it has. And often for the worst. Winning the FA Cup used to be a kick away from the league title in its scale of achievement, now it matters less than finishing fourth in the Premier League – a sporting perversity that would change instantly if a Champions League spot was an added bonus for victors down Wembley way in mid-May.
The Cup final day used to stop the nation, now it doesn't even provide a full stop to the domestic season – while managers sometimes field weakened teams in semi-finals (Arsenal in 2004 and Manchester United in 2009) and even finals (United in 1999) because there are larger targets looming.
Still, you can't blame the bigger sides for doing it earlier in the competition: after all, they rarely get punished. For the past 17 years, the FA Cup has been won by a team in the top 10 of the Premier League on the morning of third-round day. Even more strikingly, in nine of the last 11 years it's been won by a team in the top three at the start of January.
For the good of the competition that's not healthy. We all yearn for the equivalent of Sunderland 1973 or a Crazy Gang to throw some spice into the pot. But that's a consequence of modern football, not the failing nuts and bolts of the FA Cup. The Premier League is won by one of the same select group every year, has commercial deals coming out of its ears, and is predictable as a child's ABC, yet it is rarely subject to the lie-down-and-take-it flagellation that the FA Cup suffers.
So for a change let's celebrate it. Treasure it. Revel in it. Sure, it's not the same tournament that lured you in as a kid – probably because the final was one of a handful of live games shown on TV that year. Those memories belong to a distant England, a country of dreamy sunshine and brilliantine. But what's left isn't so bad. Certainly sufficient tales remain; tales that continue to warm the soul on grey January days.
• This article has been amended since first publication
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