Anyone who has run a newspaper sports section knows that eight months of the year, maybe even nine or 10 … you do not have to worry about a section having a newsy feel.

News just happens, in the form of scheduled events. Might be news in addition to the scheduled events. Might break your own. But most of the time you can count on being backstopped by Significant Things Happening As Scheduled.

At The National, in Abu Dhabi, we have just stepped out of that comfortable time of the year (the endless soccer season is … over?) and into the dry period of looking around and saying: “Wait, there is no news about anything we really care about?”

In Southern California, baseball carried us through the summer. The fallow period in that neighborhood is/was right after ball, in October, when the Dodgers and Angels were no longer playing six times a week, and the NBA had not started, and it required planning (or luck) to find a news lead.

The period around Christmas — also tough, in an non-NFL town.

Those are the times when you run a five-part series. I’m just gonna guess that about 75 percent of all newspaper “sports enterprise” came during these fallow periods.

Late May, and June are rough in this part of the world. The soccer leagues we care about are done. The transfer window has not opened. Most of the big coaching moves have already been made. It is not an Olympic summer, nor is it a World Cup summer.

Which is how a semi-soft feature on Matteo Manassero, rising star on the European golf tour (and an Abu Dhabi “golf ambassador”) winds up on the cover today and how Novak Djokovic winning a second-round match at the French Open makes the cover tomorrow.

We all know it, intellectually: Fallow periods happen, and they are predictable.

Still, when you reach that point where you don’t have the comfortable fall back of today’s Luis Suarez story or the Manchester United game or the President’s Cup final … it always comes as a bit of a jolt.