It's all over. Defeat to West Ham saw the near-inevitable come to pass. Despite defeats for Hull and Newcastle, Boro couldn't beat the Hammers on the final day and so are relegated after eleven seasons of Premier League football.

Despite the best attempts of the media to market this as a climactic conclusion to the season, all four struggling sides lost, leading to a predictable end to the season. As such, I won't spend too much time analysing the match at Upton Park, and instead offer a look back at the season as a whole, and analyse what went wrong and why.

Although Man United did beat Hull thanks to a marvellous goal, they never threatened to trounce them, leaving the impetus on the most goal-shy side in English football to win by a considerable margin. It was clear right from the start that none of this injury-wracked side had faith in scoring four goals, and as soon as Carlton Cole slotted home it was effectively over.

Fingernails: we're hanging by them, we're chewing them nervously. Boro are still not relegated yet, although judging by the expanses of bare red seats at the Riverside on Saturday, a lot of supporters just wish we'd just get it over with already.

Amazingly, despite Monday's crushing loss to Newcastle, at halftime in the last home game of the season we were out of the relegation zone, with Hull and Newcastle both losing while we lead Villa. At that point there was real hope in the air, and the crowd were defiantly chanting the Great Escape theme.

So that's it then. Both managers said it, every pundit agreed with it and every player knew it: lose this one and we're relegated. And now we surely are. Newcastle won the battle, and are in poll position to win the miniature war at the foot of the table.

It's still not a certainty, of course, but you'd get fantastic odds on us surviving now. We've lurched through the last part of the season, lacking any consistency or form whatsoever, and with Newcastle now above Hull and West Brom beginning to get results, it would be a safer bet that we finish bottom of the league.

It was one of the few boasting points of Gareth Southgate's managerial career that Boro had never lost to Arsenal under his stewardship. So much for that record, eh? In the absence of even that most pedantic point of pride this week, I've resolved to keep myself cheerful by cramming this entry with as many ballistics-based metaphors as possible.

So Boro's unlikely ambitions of snatching three points and a ticket out of the relegation zone were efficiently shot down by the Gunners. Cesc Fabregas was the marksman, firing off two lethal shots: one the product of a beautifully orchestrated Arsenal move, the second a composed finish to kill off any chances of Boro recovery.

So the four Must Wins are over and out of twelve realistic points we garnered just four. Before this sequence of winnable fixtures began I prophesised that any less than six points would see us dead and buried.

The draw against Fulham was certainly a crashing disappointment after the glimmer of hope offered by last week's victory over Hull and nothing new there: how many times in the last few months has the emotional tone of these entries veered wildly from one result to the next? And yet, somehow, things don't seem quite that gloomy around Teesside.

What madness is this? Boro actually living up to expectations winning one of these talked-up Must Win games and scoring three goals in the process? Truly, these are strange times.

I'll admit it: I wasn't sure we could actually beat Hull. I was on the verge of writing Boro off after they had squandered countless chances to drag themselves out of the sediment of the drop zone, and when Hull equalised after barely six minutes of being behind my heart sank faster than a Titanic constructed out of masonry. The gut-wrenching feeling of false hope drowned out by a wave of bitter disappointment was all too familiar.

Of course, we defied precedent and went on to win the game, and with favourable results elsewhere hope is now blooming around Teesside once again. We're still not safe but after one uplifting win we don't seem nearly as deep in trouble as we did a weekend ago. And if this is madness, there is method in it.

We're down, aren't we? There isn't going to be some improbable turn-around in form. One win in twenty games (!) and, faced with one of those Must Wins against a team not exactly playing great football right now, we got smashed to pieces.

I think most Boro fans have, by now, grown used to the idea of playing in the Championship next season. It's not quite as painful as it was to see us slump to yet another humiliating defeat. There's only so long you can stand the hurt before you go numb.

It shouldn't need recapping to any observer of the Premiership why a result (preferably a win) against Stoke on Saturday was vital to our chances of avoiding the drop. A relegation six-pointer with no game for the next two weeks due to the international break: a loss would have been (and was) catastrophic.

The aftermath of the match saw any number of "Southgate out!" cries on amongst the fans, whether on the buses home, the pubs afterwards or on any number of online message boards, although this was far from the worst performance we've seen recently. Stoke have a solid home record and have beaten a list of teams better than us there. This was arguably the toughest of our "must-wins".

That feeling is back. The optimism of wins against West Ham and Liverpool has rapidly dried up, and a fortnight after we looked to be turning the proverbial corner, Boro are back to scraping draws in the must-win games.

In the aftermath of the result I ran into my housemate, who had an expression almost as gloomy as mine. He's one of those poor misguided souls who follow rugby instead of football, and also a self-declared Welshman, despite being born in England. He'd been watching the Six Nations match between Wales and Italy, which he declared "disappointing".

Here we are again: another entry and another massive emotional contrast to the last one. It's probably getting boring to read and it's certainly heart-rending to write about.

I wrote in my previous entry that we needed to maintain the momentum built up by wins over West Ham and Liverpool by getting something against Tottenham. It turns out we didn't even get a performance. Although we actually managed more shots than Spurs the only one that went in was an offside effort from Tuncay, and a defence that I have been praising for its solidity was smashed to pieces by Robbie Keane, Aaron Lennon and the other members of Spurs' ludicrously expensive forward line. It was, in short, a capitulation.

It has felt slightly ridiculous these last couple of weeks as the tone of this blog has veered from optimism to despair and lurched back through the gears again. But that’s football. You can write whatever you want about it, but sometimes the most finely wrought prose or acute, piercing insight just will not capture it.

Right now it feels almost futile sitting down and typing up this match, because only a week ago I was saying the exact opposite and next week I'll probably be saying something different again. That's the essence of football and that's why we love it, why we hold our heads in our hands and wonder why we turn up, and then why we punch the air and wonder what we'd ever do without it.

Things really are starting to look grim now. In a week when the unrest of the Boro fans reached a high water mark by lapping against the feet of Steve Gibson himself, the team simply had to get three very winnable points against Wigan on Saturday. They didn’t.

Until recently, it’s been possible to retain the view that we’re simply going through a bad period- a slide that can be arrested. The messages coming out of the team have been positive, the promising start to the season is still in people’s minds and memories of similarly poor spells in the last few seasons remain. In the last week, however, every time I have spoken to a fellow Boro fan, the same barely credulous words are uttered: "We’re going down, aren’t we?" After watching a completely toothless display in what must be dubbed a Must Win Game, it’s hard to disagree.