There’s always a game on. A few years back, the Guardian ran a tongue in cheek preemptive campaign to “Stop Football” during what, at the time, was quaintly referred to as the offseason. If you follow MLS, the idea of an offseason is just adorable, but a rather moot concept according to the non FIFA calendar under which the league operates. It means I’m simultaneously enjoying the fresh cut grass optimism/denial of a new season while mentally distancing myself from my team’s impending relegation over in England. To give you a sense of my hideous cultural confusion, my circadian rhythms are verklempt, like.

So as a public service to similar sufferers who don’t know how to feel at any given moment of the MLS season, after a month of it, here’s my attempt at an MLS almanac to guide you through the phases of the season.

Good month to prune, to encourage growth, to breed animals; have dental work, peer anxiously in mirror at faded Florida training camp tan; sign random Honduran national team reserve.

MLS does not have a winter schedule like the rest of soccer. Now and again it contemplates one, but then it notes the weather in Toronto and stops contemplating it.

During the last MLS Cup week, there was a warning about certain parts of the country being so cold that venturing outside might result in the water in your eyes freezing. For all the pressure FIFA puts on MLS about having its season match the traditional arc of fall to spring, there are enormous logistical difficulties to fair scheduling during winter. Even by March, when the season kicks off, it will often see cold weather teams sent on tours to sunnier climes, or playing their first couple of home games in alternative, covered venues. (March means Montreal kicking the ball among the pile of rugs that is the Big O’s artificial turf.)

There’s a staggered element to the schedule right from the start, and yes, it affects the standard of play after winter, Toronto’s BMO Field looks like no man’s land in the Somme. Move that a couple of months earlier and it gets even uglier.

March is also when the ghost of the decent team that earned the right to compete two seasons earlier get spanked by cheerful midseason Mexican sides in the CONCACAF Champions League. The Galaxy in particular have been perennial competitors at this stage of the competition over the past few years, and the resultant stop start scheduling has created the sensation that their domestic season never starts until it’s halfway over.

April: The False PeakingGood month to cut hair, to encourage growth; breed animals; graft or pollinate; lend the underperforming draft class to USL Pro subsidiary; claim that it’s “still early season.”

This time of year, we see the strange phenomenon of “false peaking.” It’s why even before the Sounders ended the unbeaten start to FC Dallas’s season at the weekend, long standing Dallas fans weren’t getting carried away by their start to 2014. Around this time last year, Dallas were at the top of the standings, alongside Montreal Impact. By season’s end, Dallas had missed the playoffs and parted company with their coach, while the Impact scraped into the playoffs and crashed straight out, in a storm of red cards and Italian cursing.

So, don’t Nike LeBron 11 look at the current standings. That said, do look at the current standings, because for every coach who’s currently claiming, “It’s early yet” to explain why his side hasn’t got a win (yes, you, Caleb Porter and Mike Petke), generally projecting the Air Jordan 2011 air of a mechanic tinkering with a sputtering engine that will soon be in turbo mode, there’ll be another still asserting that the playoffs are “a realistic possibility” in July, when they’re just not. See Olsen, Ben, in 2013.

May: The Expanding

Good month to dry stone wall; to check drainage ditches; to announce South Dakota expansion team.

Near enough to the promise of summer tournaments, close enough to the end of hostilities in Europe, May is the perfect month to introduce another MLS franchise, replete with instant fans and a Photoshopped rendering of the proposed downtown stadium on the site of the existing contemporary art museum. It’s a time of intense optimism, projections, and mildly fudged figures.

As for May, in actual league play, May is May. Too close to the start, yet to go through the distorting filter of the dog days of summer May is May.

June: The Vanishing

Good month to destroy pests and weeds; quit smoking; go camping; confidently claim, “He’s ready,” while doubtfully eyeing a 5 year old academy kid; sign another Honduran reserve.

This is the month where the sweet science Air Jordan Fusion 5 of building a deep squad on a salary cap meets one of the true joys of summer/winter scheduling: tournament play. If it’s not a World Cup, it’s a Gold Cup. Imagine a team, having had a decent start to the season, having done the hard work to identify an undervalued Central American who turns out to be the attacking playmaker their otherwise pedestrian squad needed. Then they find out he is now joining his national team in what will inevitably be an unlikely deep run in whatever competition they’re playing in, during which he will twang his Achilles.

In the three month absence, his MLS side will play a $45,000 squad member from the 18th round of the 2012 draft, and the goals will dry up, prompting thundering editorials about the helpless strikers, penned by the likes of me.

July: The LampardingGood month to prune to discourage growth; castrate animals; drift listlessly around humid stadiums; go to the one game you’ll attend this year; mention that, “Every time I come here, you see more and more people, and it’s definitely somewhere I’d like to play at some stage in my career.”

If it’s July, it must mean a ridiculously crowded schedule of glamour exhibition games between European giants at big stadiums around the country. Galaxy, whose schedule consists of seven separate teams playing in four separate time zones, in 17 different competitions (three of which are fictional), this may also be a month where you play a couple Air Jordan 8s games against one of those teams, to “build the brand.” That the weary brand can’t remember its own name at this point is secondary to something to do with demographics and trajectories.

This is also the month when the enthusiastic GM your team appointed in February appears to be literally melting before your eyes. on a July Wednesday as “an experiment.” Having tried to paper the stadium with summer campers, Heck then got to avoid eye contact with Thierry Henry, as the Frenchman led his side out in 101 degree temperatures which the campers had largely, sensibly avoided in one of the sadder sights I’ve seen. Heck was gone in about a minute.

It’s also the time of year when high pressure teams like Kansas City wish they didn’t have to run all the damned time.

Also this month, when the moon is over Biloxi, Frank Lampard will claim to be interested in moving to MLS. He may be in a press conference or a KOBE 9 darkened bedroom in Chingford, Essex, at the time, but he will do it. Every year. See also: Drogba, Didier; Ballack, Michael.