BETTER times for Dumbarton, as they enter the new era that was outlined yesterday, have come at the worst of times. All season the Sons have taken a sore skelping and at the bottom they sit.

For three seasons most of the fun for their fans has been akin to the thrill of downhill ski-ing. Yet their team have twice been champions of all. They have after all won the Scottish Cup. That, however, was not this year, it was not even this century. But in all their days, Dumbarton have not before been left looking up at everybody else, never once since 1872.

Home wins this season have totalled two, and at Boghead today going for a third means the challenge of beating Cowdenbeath, whom cruel statistics rate as the second worst team in the land. To a harsh outside world it amounts to the non-match of the day.

All of the normal optimistic decency for the end of a season will be observed. The tricky and inventive Martin Mooney will receive the reward of player of the year from Graeme Robertson, editor of the Sons View match programme.

In last Saturday's game at Montrose (a defeat as it happens), Mooney, a fireman in real life, scored his fiftieth league goal in his 200th appearance.

Graeme Robertson was there. He has been persistently and loyally there at every ground on the extended atlas of the third division. Estimating the size of Dumbarton's travelling crowd at Links Park, he counted them individually up to 20. ''I could give you our names if you like,'' he said. In his real life he is something august at the head office in Edinburgh of a bank.

He is one of a support team of 10 otherwise mature and sensible persons - bank executives, a lawyer, office managers, a draughtsman, a civil servant - who everywhere stand and suffer for Dumbarton. ''If I wanted to sit, I would go to the pictures,'' he said. Where so ever the Sons goeth, they go, although he conceded that for the longest journeys on bleakest Saturdays there were sometimes call-offs.

For today's programme he wrote with some perplexity about all the weeping and wailing for Hibernian and other losers. For Dumbarton he wants no tears. ''Sons' fans have had more practice recently than most at this particularly feeling and, funnily enough, life seems to have gone on,'' is the view he takes.

After the crunch with the Cowden, the team of 10 will have their regular ritual at the end of a season of a last supper of curries and vie with each other to avoid coming last in a 300-question quiz set by Jim McAllister, the club historian and archivist.

Jim McAllister has followed Dumbarton since aged three. ''They're where I find home on

Saturdays. Always there is the fear of missing something. I'd hate not to be there in case something sensational might happen,'' he offered by way of an explanation.

Feelings are mixed about losing Boghead as a change from losing at it. It is the most ancient hallowed feel in the Scottish game, or possibly the world. Dumbarton have stuck by their roots since 1879. It's sward has been studded by legions of worthy Sons - the brothers Parlane and Coyle, goal-hungry Kenny Wilson, mighty Mark Clougherty, Ian Wallace, who has returned as manager, and now Martin Mooney.

Boghead may be the most scenic park anywhere. Eyes that weary of following the ball lift to The Crag, a majestic outcrop of the Kilpatricks, or else view at night games the illuminated splendour of the town's rock and castle. At today's match will be eyed a favourite crush barrier, a square of turf, or a stand seat as a future adornment of back gardens. Memories linger since 1979 of its 100-seat stand called the Hen Hoose. A social club was housed in a former workmen's bothy from the building of the Forth Road Bridge. One section of terracing is still enclosed by the roof from the vanished train station at Turnberry, Ayrshire. Graeme Robertson reckoned that as a football shrine the park has sustained 24 mature trees.

Like others, he has seen a flitting coming. Houses have been encroaching on the site for most of this century. Once called Fatal Boghead because of how its hilly terrain put visiting teams in awe, the old park has lost its capacity to intimidate or even amuse.

Abandoning Boghead was talked about as part of an earlier fresh start in 1975.

After toying with taking over Clydebank, the Sons contemplated an uprooting as the only way forward.

Where they flirted with then was Cumbernauld.