Supporters will be surprised to learn that skipper Luke Chambers is more disappointed now than he was last year when Town were beaten by fierce rivals Norwich in the play-offs.
That was an obvious low point but Chambers insists the fact that he and his colleagues have not at least emulated last season’s top six finish is a source of even more frustration.
Chambers, 30, said: "As strange as it might sound, I think I’m probably more disappointed with how we have ended this season than how we ended last season. We have just fallen away at the end and it obviously wasn’t through lack of trying.
"I’m pretty speechless at how it has ended and very, very disappointed. I’ve been trying to keep my spirits up around the lads but it has hit me pretty hard, the fact that I feel we should have made the play-offs.
"You look back on moments throughout the season and you think, ‘We could have done better here and there’. We just have to try to learn from it and build on it for next year really.
"I tried to put the play-off defeat out of my mind completely, losing to them and the way we did it, but if circumstances had have been different that day we would definitely have taken them a lot closer than we did in the end.
"It’s easy to look back on this season and say that we lost David McGoldrick for a lot of the season, that Daryl Murphy never really got into his stride, that Ryan Fraser was tremendous in every game he played and then we lost him for the majority of the season and that Teddy Bishop has only just returned from injury and played his first games of the season.
"It’s hardly a secret that we missed those four players for a lot of the year and if you took four players of that quality out of any team it would weaken them considerably.
"Maybe in the last few weeks we have lacked a goal threat and the fact that we haven’t scored enough goals might have been our downfall. The four players I mention are the type who could unlock teams, as they have shown in the past.
"But the lack of goals isn’t just down to the strikers. We’ve been very fortunate to have four top-class strikers at the club and it has proved difficult to have them all fit at the same time.
"We haven’t had that luxury so far. Every striker wants to play but we have had to play people out of position and just fit in when they can.
"The boys have still scored quite a lot of goals — Murph’s got 10, Pits has got 11 — and it was good to see Didz score at the weekend. If he goes away with Ireland in the summer it will do him good and he’ll come back ready to try to last the whole season for us.”