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There is an obvious temptation after Lincoln City conceded a 90th-minute winner to focus on the pain of the result, because that is the emotion that follows you out of the ground and onto the motorway. We had been so close to taking something from one of the strongest sides in the Championship, and after leading for so long it was difficult not to feel that we had been denied something at the very end. However, once that initial frustration begins to fade, I find it almost impossible to be disappointed with anything City actually did. We lost the game, and that stings, but there was nothing about the performance that made me question whether we belong at this level. The unbeaten run is over, which feels almost surreal when you consider where it began and where it has finally ended. When that sequence started last season, I don’t think many of us would have imagined that the next defeat would come at Middlesbrough, after winning League One and returning to the Championship for the first time in 65 years. There were points during that run when a narrow win in League One could still leave people grumbling about aspects of the performance, yet here we are disappointed because a side with genuine Premier League ambitions needed a last-minute goal to beat us. Football changes quickly, and perhaps nothing illustrates how far we have come quite as neatly as that. What encouraged me most was how quickly the occasion stopped feeling like an occasion. Before kick-off, it was difficult not to drink everything in because this was different, this was the Championship, and this was exactly the sort of away day we had spent years wanting. Tom Shaw had spoken beforehand about enjoying all of that until 2.59 pm and then remembering that we were there on merit, and I think the team demonstrated exactly that mentality. Once the game began, we did not look like a club visiting somewhere glamorous for a cup tie and hoping to survive. We looked like Lincoln City, playing in our usual way, against another Championship team. There was always a possibility that the step up would force us to become something completely different. Instead, the first half contained so many of the characteristics that carried us through last season, particularly the aggression and organisation of the press. Middlesbrough wanted to build from the back, but when the ball went backwards or into certain areas we jumped onto them quickly and removed the obvious passing options. There were several occasions when they simply had to put the ball out of play because we had pinned them in, and for a side with that much technical quality to look uncomfortable in possession was a significant compliment to the work City were doing. The goal was probably the best example of how well the plan worked. George Wickens’ distribution gave Freddie Draper something to attack, Draper did superbly to win the aerial contact and help move the ball into the right-hand channel, and Tendayi Darikwa was high enough up the pitch to receive it in a genuinely dangerous area. His pull-back was allowed to run through the middle and Reach arrived to finish first time, which was a lovely piece of football rather than a goal we had somehow stumbled into. There will obviously be a lot made of Reach scoring against his former club and becoming the man to give us the lead on our return to the Championship, but the quality of the move itself deserves just as much attention. Draper was central to so much of what worked in the opening period, and I thought he was excellent. There is a lazy assumption that physical players stepping up a division will suddenly find defenders too strong or too clever for them, but he gave Middlesbrough’s back line a horrible afternoon for long periods. His work with his back to goal gave us a platform to play from, he competed relentlessly for direct balls and, importantly, he also threatened to stretch them when opportunities appeared behind the defence. By the time he came off, he looked exhausted, which was hardly surprising given the amount of work he had been asked to get through. The second half was different, but I don’t think that was simply because City decided to sit on the lead. There was probably an element of natural retreat, because protecting a one-goal advantage away from home against a side like Middlesbrough inevitably influences starting positions, but the opposition also improved. They began moving the ball more intelligently from one side of the pitch to the other and found better routes around our press, which meant we were no longer able to trap them as high up the field. Once they escaped that first line, we had to retreat into our shape, and suddenly the distances between Draper and the players trying to support him became much larger. That change explains why we became less threatening rather than simply saying we were too defensive. In the first half, if Draper won a ball or held off a defender, there were teammates close enough to turn that moment into an attack. In the second, he increasingly had to retain possession for an extra couple of seconds while the rest of the team travelled 20 or 30 yards to support him, and against Championship defenders that is a very different task. When Street and Olaofe came on, the problem remained because they were entering a match in which our starting position was already considerably deeper. It was not that the substitutes failed to offer an outlet, but rather that the structure of the game made providing one far harder. Olaofe’s break late in the game summed that up perfectly. He managed to get down the right and initially looked to have created a promising situation, but there was almost nobody close enough to support him, and Middlesbrough recovered their shape incredibly quickly. Within seconds, what looked like a potential counterattack had become three defenders against one attacker, leaving him with very few sensible options other than trying an effort himself. That is partly about what we can improve, because we will need to find ways of getting bodies higher more quickly, but it is also an example of the quality and organisation we are now facing every week. There were periods when Middlesbrough had the ball for what felt like minutes at a time, moving it around the outside of our shape and probing for an opening, but I never felt as though we were being ripped apart. They had possession and territory, certainly, but City defended the middle extremely well and repeatedly forced them to go around the outside. Against one of the division’s best possession teams, there is a world of difference between allowing the opposition to have the ball in safe areas and allowing them to create chance after chance. Their equaliser had a frustrating element of fortune from our perspective. We defended the first cross, applied pressure to the next phase and did enough to make the follow-up delivery hurried, only for the ball to take the sort of route that allowed Lankshear to react first and poke it home. From a Middlesbrough point of view, that is exactly why they have invested heavily in a striker, because he is alive inside the six-yard box and anticipates where the ball might drop. From ours, I don’t see a glaring technical error that deserves to be pinned on somebody. Sometimes you defend a situation reasonably well and the ball still falls to a good striker. The winner was different in its construction but similar in the sense that individual quality eventually told. McGree did exceptionally well on the right, created the yard he needed and delivered the ball into exactly the area where Lankshear could attack it. There will always be small details coaches can identify afterwards, whether that is starting a little higher, delaying the attack or preventing the player from reaching the crossing position, but sometimes Championship football is going to look like that. That is why I often struggle with the idea that every defeat needs an individual culprit. There were no obvious performances that made me come away thinking somebody had been exposed by the level, and there were several that suggested precisely the opposite. Wickens was excellent, not merely because of the saves but because he remained so calm in possession when Middlesbrough tried to press him at speed. His distribution was consistently accurate; he never looked hurried and there was none of the uncertainty you might expect from a goalkeeper experiencing his first Championship league game with us. Elerewe was another who looked completely comfortable. There were moments when Middlesbrough threatened to release runners into dangerous areas and he dealt with them with a calmness that made difficult situations look straightforward. McGrandles was similarly impressive, combining his usual defensive intelligence with the confidence to take the ball under pressure and play his way out, including one wonderful moment when he casually nutmegged Whittaker and carried possession away from our own box. House also deserves enormous credit because so much of his contribution came without the ball, helping the shape, competing physically and doing the sort of work that allowed others around him to function. Those performances create interesting questions about the squad rather than worrying ones. Coubiș is still to establish himself in the starting side, while Bradley offers huge experience, yet Elerewe has hardly given the coaching staff any reason to remove him. That is exactly the sort of competition we need because we are going to require different qualities at different stages of the season. I don’t think the XI and shape we saw at Middlesbrough will automatically be repeated against Portsmouth, because the nature of that game should ask different questions and give us opportunities to play in different areas. That also feeds into the conversation around what we still need before the window closes. We are not looking at a finished squad yet, and there are clearly senior additions still to come, which makes this performance even more encouraging. The obvious area exposed by the second half was the difficulty of maintaining an attacking threat once Draper had tired, particularly when we needed somebody capable of receiving the ball under pressure and buying enough time for the rest of the team to move up the pitch. That does not mean finding another Draper clone, but maybe instead a 6ft 8in focal point…. Perhaps the greatest compliment came after the final whistle, when Middlesbrough celebrated the victory with genuine enthusiasm. I have seen the suggestion that we should somehow be irritated by that, as though a club with their resources should treat beating City as routine, but I took it completely differently. They had just been pushed all the way by a newly-promoted side, needed a goal in the final minute and knew they had been involved in a proper contest. If anything, their reaction felt like respect because nobody inside that stadium could reasonably pretend they had simply brushed us aside. The financial contrast only reinforces that point. Their match-winner alone cost many times more than our entire starting XI, and that is the reality of the division we have entered. There are going to be clubs whose budgets dwarf ours and players whose transfer fees would fund several years of our recruitment, but money only tells you what resources teams have available, not how competitive a football match will be. For 90 minutes at Middlesbrough, City made that financial disparity largely irrelevant, which is a significant achievement when you consider where the two clubs have come from. That is ultimately why the defeat hurts without worrying me. We were minutes away from extending the unbeaten run to 30 matches and collecting a point away at one of the sides expected to challenge for promotion, having led for around 50 minutes and competed on equal terms for long periods. Instead, we leave with nothing because Championship football punishes small margins and because Middlesbrough possessed the individual quality to exploit one chance at the very end. There will be lessons in the second-half retreat and in how we maintain an attacking outlet when momentum swings against us, but those are adjustments rather than reasons for alarm. I went into the afternoon wondering what Championship football would actually look like for us once the novelty disappeared, and I came away with a fairly clear answer. It looks quicker, more ruthless and less forgiving, but it does not look beyond us. We did not need a freak performance, a goalkeeper making 15 saves or an opposition side having an inexplicably poor afternoon to compete with Middlesbrough. We simply played like City, did most things very well and were eventually beaten by two moments from a very good team. If this is what one of the hardest away games of the season looks like, there is an enormous amount to take from it. The unbeaten run has gone and the last-minute goal will sting for a while, but the bigger picture feels far more important. We went to the Riverside on the opening day of our Championship season and, within minutes, stopped looking like visitors who were simply grateful to be there. We looked like we belonged.