“I COULDN’T see too much good in losing that play-off final at Wembley last year, but perhaps this is meant to be.”

Only now, after winning promotion back to the Premier League, can Reading manager Brian McDermott make sense of missing out to Swansea last season.

Perhaps 12 months from now Burnley manager Eddie Howe might have a similar sense of reasoning.

A campaign that began with plenty of optimism, just as the previous one did, is ending with nothing but pride to play for.

There are ifs and buts aplenty for the Clarets as the 2011/12 season draws to a close.

If only their home form had been better, if only they hadn’t dropped points from winning positions, there might still be so much more at stake going into the last two games of the season.

As it is, Howe – at the end of his first full season in charge – is already looking ahead to the next campaign, while trying to bow out of this one on a winning note.

There are echoes of last season that they had hoped to avoid, when Burnley’s faint top six bid evaporated before the last game.

Events of July and August, when key players were sold, have conspired against them now.

If Chris Eagles and Tyrone Mears hadn’t been allowed to leave two weeks before the first game – or at least sold earlier if their exit was inevitable – then Howe would not have wasted, for want of a better word, valuable pre-season time on the training ground with them, and instead could have invested more time into their replacements.

There are lessons to be learned for the future, at all levels of the club.

It isn’t all negative, though.

If Mears had stayed, then Kieran Trippier would not be a Burnley player now.

He will be a big player going forward and he isn’t the only one.

Twelve months of regular first team football for the likes of David Edgar, who has earned a contract extension; Ben Mee, who is settled at a new club after an uncertain future with Manchester City; and Charlie Austin, who has proved to everyone that he can score goals in the Championship can only stand the individuals – and therefore the team – in good stead for the future.

Success this season may have come too soon.

With a year’s experience and Championship exertions, perhaps this year’s frustrations are ‘meant to be’ for Howe’s Clarets.