Through the course of the past working week I was fortunate enough to speak to Paul Stratford, who older supporters of this club will remember with nothing but fondness.
Stratford was doing the 'next big thing' routine long before any of the current crop of Cobblers youngsters were even born but his story was to end on a sad note as injury curtailed his career in 1978 with the highly-rated striker only 22 years old.
Today, you need look no further than the corner of the west stand reserved for injured or unselected players to see the club skipper Chris Doig, who has been sidelined through injury since November.
It's all too easy - not to mention lazy - to think of a footballer's life as an easy one, but careers can be ended in an instant by even the most slightly mistimed challenge, on the field or sometimes even in training.
Last Saturday all the talk (literally all of it, if Radio Five's 606 programme was anything to go by) was about Arsenal's Croatian striker Eduardo, and the broken leg he had sustained in the lunchtime game at Birmingham City.
Perhaps the biggest losers are the player himself and his nation, who now go into a major international championship without the player who led the scoring for them in the qualifiers.
It's hard to feel anything but sympathy for Eduardo, and even a shred of sadness for Martin Taylor, whose tackle inflicted the injury. Taylor definitely did not mean to do what he did; the tackle was mistimed, not malicious.
Both earn substantially more than myself and probably every single person in the ground this afternoon but the cost of incidents like this cannot be measured in pounds and pence.
Being hit with a stiff challenge will remain part of the game and it would be ridiculous to implement anything that would reduce the capacity of tackling as a skill in football.
So, it's difficult to know what to say except to conclude that bad injuries are part of the game. An ugly, horrendous and often sad part of the game, but very much a part of it nonetheless.

If Arsenal win the Premier League this season - and for what it's worth I'm not convinced they will - it will represent a huge achievement for Arsene Wenger.
That might sound like an outlandish statement given the fact their matchday income grows on a weekly basis and is comfortably in the seven-figure range, but you have to look at what they are up against.
Manchester United might have giant debts as a result of the Glazer takeover, but they don't seem to have inhibited their spending power. In the summer they splashed out the equivalent of a small country's gross national product to bring in Owen Hargreaves, Nani, Anderson and Carlos Tevez. Arsenal bought Eduardo and lost one of the most feared attacking players on the planet to Barcelona.
Given that wealth of attacking talent, anything less than the league title should be seen as a failure for Manchester United.
But the Arsenal example proves how far you can go with a young, hungry side with a solid work ethic and strong team spirit. Now where else is such a template being put in place?