Nick Metcalfe reflects on another memorable year for snooker in 2024, both good and bad, with Judd Trump once again top of the class.
Snooker in 2024 was a right old mixed bag. A bit like life itself.
One thing is of course guaranteed in this sport. The compelling stories and moments always keep us hanging on for more.
Right from the start, the action on the table delivered, with that grudge match in the Masters final between Ronnie O'Sullivan and Ali Carter.
One man just kept on winning this year. But frankly, what's new? Judd Trump has been the game's premier force for more than half a decade now.
The Bristol man helped himself to five more titles over the last twelve months, including the Shanghai Masters and Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters early in this current campaign.
And at the start of December, Trump put another Triple Crown title on the board with UK Championship success in York, edging this generational talent ever closer to bonafide baize greatness.
The World Championship in Sheffield may not have been a classic - although it did give us a match for the ages when John Higgins produced a glorious clearance in the deciding frame to beat Mark Allen - but you'd have needed a heart of stone not to be affected as Kyren Wilson celebrated Crucible glory with his family. Nice guys do come first sometimes.
The Englishman did much of the hard work in the first session of the final, going 7-0 ahead against Jak Jones. But Welshman Jones scrapped for his life after that and Wilson was eventually relieved to get over the line with an 18-14 victory.
Wilson has since followed that up with two more titles in this 2024-25 season, beating Trump in the finals of the Xi'an Grand Prix and Northern Ireland Open, and has spoken passionately of his belief that he can be the player to defy a certain curse come the spring. He couldn't, could he?
The evergreen Mark Williams won a pair of prestigious events, the Tour Championship and Champion of Champions. But another superstar, Neil Robertson, fell out of form so dramatically that he didn't even qualify for the World Championship.
Typically, the confident Australian vowed to quickly bounce back and he did just that, claiming the English Open title in September. Class truly is permanent.
It has felt like a really significant year for Chinese snooker. We've been talking about potential domination from Chinese players for so long now, it's become pure cliche.
But when two 21-year-olds meet in a ranking final - as they did last Sunday when Lei Peifan beat Wu Yize to win the Scottish Open - it's easy to see it as a symbol of a potential shaking up of the old order.
We also saw 35-year-old Xiao Guodong finally win his first ever ranking event at the Wuhan Open, while Ding Junhui, who is now 37, returned to the winners' enclosure with victory at the International Championship.
There's been much to enjoy wherever you looked, and there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful if you love this sport. It may not always seem like that if you regularly scour social media or internet forums. But really, there's a lot to be encouraged about right now.
There are top level tournaments nearly every week of the season. When you attend them, you'll usually come across decent crowds and a genuine buzz.
There's still a mountain of live snooker on television, including much of it on mainstream channels. Some sports would kill for a quarter of the coverage.
Viewing figures remain robust too. It still feels like the big snooker moments - even in this mad scattered age of all the interests - can cut through the noise.
Not that everything in the sport's garden smells of roses. Some elements of the snooker year have left a sour taste.
I remain wary of the bromance with Saudi Arabia. There may be untold fortunes at play, but money isn't everything and an alliance with a country that has one of the worst human rights records on the planet feels like it crosses a moral line for many fans.
The first invitational event in March came across as more like an advertorial than a serious television broadcast, and while the ranking tournament early in this season was more palatable, it would have been vastly improved with a little less PR and a little more serious discussion.
It's disappointing that some events in mainland Europe seem to have just slipped away. The European Masters was held in Romania, Belgium, Austria and Germany over the past decade but has now disappeared from the calendar altogether.
The issue that dominated talk during the Sheffield fortnight in April and May was the future of the Crucible - which is only contracted to host until 2027 - as venue for the tournament. It's a shame really, as the debate does at times almost overshadow the play taking place inside the arena.
Many people seem surer than before that this stellar event cannot continue at a theatre that holds fewer than 1,000 fans. But half a century of history is a lot to give up, and the Crucible has a presence and magic that gives it an iconic status far beyond snooker.
Elsewhere, we've seen Zhao Xintong take his first steps back into the game following his ban as part of snooker's biggest match fixing scandal.
It's true that Zhao never fixed a match - he accepted charges of being a party to another player fixing two matches and betting on matches himself - but it was still rank bad behaviour that damaged the sport's reputation and it would be nice to think the flowery language being used about him could be toned down a bit. Zhao was forbidden from competing, remember, not away on a backpacking trip.
Meanwhile, Mark King's career is effectively over after he was banned for five years for match fixing. This kind of cheating remains a scourge on the game and it would be naive in the extreme to think it's not still going on.
So there's darkness lurking in the shadows, even if much of the game continues to thrive in the light. I suppose it was ever thus.
It was a poignant year too, as we lost two of this sport's most celebrated champions, both of them hailing from Wales.
Ray Reardon dominated snooker in the 1970s, winning six world titles, and he remained a revered figure for generations. He even made a return to the spotlight when he mentored O'Sullivan to world title glory.
Wonderfully, Reardon never lost that competitive edge. Even in recent television documentaries, the glint in his eye was still there, as he talked about his rivals like he'd played them the week before.
Terry Griffiths won the World Championship as a qualifier in 1979, just a year after turning professional, the start of an outstanding two-decade career that also saw him pick up UK and Masters titles.
Griffiths later become one of the sport's greatest coaches, inspiring a number of stars, and was also a fine television commentator.
We'll miss both these memorable snooker characters immensely. May they rest in peace.
The show goes on, as it must. I hope you enjoyed your snooker in 2024 and will continue to do into 2025 and long beyond. Merry Christmas to all.