Again, late to the party, but here is my contribution:
you can absolutely start a saga without a long term Covenant, and have the first chapter of the saga be about choosing the site and settling it, while the party has some kind of "back up home".
To use my own saga as an example: the party were given temporary accommodation along with a deadline (the bottom two floors a large incomplete house in another Covenant and 2 years rent free) additionally, they did not have labs (which are all important to develop spells and make items). This both allowed them to have a place to leave books, gifts items and grogs not in use, somewhere to rest and also access to older magi who could give them a nudge or hint.
I absolutely recommend this. As mages go from apprentices to full mage status, they have a gauntlet. I ran for 3 people and we did the gauntlet for two of the mages (the players who were less familiar with the system). For one I ran the Narva scenario (moved to 1220 instead of 1241) and for the other the Specimen hunt. This gives the players a chance to test out the system and gain a feel for it, as well as test out their mages (and an opportunity to respec them if they see don't like the spell combo for example). Any grog which survives the opening scenarios can form the core of the new Covenant. Though doing 6 of them, for 6 mages seems like a lot of time taken out of the start of the saga.
The first proper PnP game that I played was DnD, and it was my second game too. As the most popular game, many people do. One game which I would say helped transition from the usual dungeon-crawling to a different type of game was the Pendragon campaign, which is also has a lot of downtime between quests, and activities/management of a family and manor.