The play-off dream may well be over but nobody should be under any illusions that this season has been anything but a resounding success.
Given the spending power of the division's heavyweights Nottingham Forest and Leeds United, the 'us against the world' mentality fostered at the outposts of Swansea City and Carlisle United, and the chequebook recruitment of Doncaster Rovers it was always going to be a tall order.
Turn the clock back nine months and the bookies had Northampton among their favourites for relegation. It's always nice to prove the assessments of that particular profession wrong.
There are some who will see this season as something of a hard luck story, a case of 'what might have been'. What if they'd bought Simon Cox in January? What if Chris Doig hadn't got injured?
But there will always be such issues over the course of an arduous, nine-month slog of football.
The main source of such frustration might be that the side destroyed a Swansea team who will almost certainly finish this year as divisional champions, and ruffled feathers from West Bridgford to Walsall.
Furthermore, if you look at the line-ups from Saturday there really wasn't a huge difference in class between the starting 11s.
Southend are the form team for the play-offs and Stuart Gray's pick to go up via them, but they aren't that much better than Northampton. Adam Barrett is a class act and Lee Barnard looks to have found his feet at this level but would any home supporter today swap Mark Bunn for either of them? Certainly not.
Success next season is achievable, although the standard of the division will go up with the addition of some splash-cash-happy clubs from below and one big boy from above.
The key to having that success will be threefold - keeping Mark Bunn, Mark Hughes and Jason Crowe at the club; getting Adebayo Akinfenwa and Gabor Gyepes fit and under contract; and doing everything the club can possibly do to get Daniel Jones, Mark Little or ideally both back at Sixfields.
If they miss out on the Wolves boys - and the word at Molineux is that such an approach will be rebuffed, although everyone has their price - then Gray's outstanding record in the loan market will once again come into play.
Going up won't be impossible. Dare to dream, dare to dream…

While fighting my way through helping complete the Chron's supplement to commemorate the Saints' latest success against a team several dozen levels below their class, I noticed out of the corner of my eye Fernando Torres scoring his 30th goal of the season for Liverpool.
The Sky commentators seemed almost surprised that a player who had cost £26.5m had been so successful, and 'in only his first season in English football.'
Surely they should have been more surprised if Torres hadn't scored 30 goals this season, because if you can't buy guaranteed class with the GNP of a small African country then how much do you have to pay?
Similarly it must be difficult for anyone to find any real satisfaction in the Premier League title race going down to a straight fight between a club happy to pay its players £133,000 a week and then watch them head straight down the tunnel when substituted, and one who splashed out almost £60m on three players in the summer.
Sometimes the football in the top flight - usually when it involves Arsenal - is good to watch but it might be a sign of my advancing years accelerating my cynicism that I just find it all so obnoxious these days.

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