Reared on a decade and a half of frustration and serial unrest, Arsenal fans everywhere are rubbing their eyes and wondering, could it really be...?
What is happening at the top of the table?
Manchester City, having won back to back titles, signed the most terrifying goal machine man has witnessed since the days of Dixie Dean and the WM formation and as a result are going to finish... second?
As someone observed on social media recently, "You can take the man out of Dortmund..."
Prior to the season, there was a school of thought that Haaland might disrupt City's state-of-the-art passing game by forcing too many opposition kick-offs. By the time the big Norwegian had scored his 15th league goal, nine games in, people were inclined to think this wasn't such a great problem.
Erling couldn't have counted on Arsenal suddenly morphing into the noughties version of themselves and taking the league by storm.
The personality of the Arsenal fan had been moulded by the long civil war over their former manager-for-life Arsene Wenger.
From at least 2009 onwards, boiling frustration was the default mode of the Arsenal fan. After a while, it began to seem that Arsenal supporters had gotten into the whole football fan business primarily for the iconoclastic thrill of raging at a fallen deity. The famed Arsenal Fan TV became a market leader in the new growth area of viral football fan rants.
Their most celebrated contributor was the late Claude Callegari, so prominent a talking head that he was subsequently honoured with a Wikipedia page. A ferocious critic of Wenger in his latter years, Mr Callegari regularly delivered himself of the kind of rants capable of triggering an avalanche in Peru.
But Claude was just one of a host of stars. A generation of football fans from all corners of the globe learned London street slang at the knee of Troopz, another impressively irate Wenger critic, who publicly upbraided his mother for being a member of the deluded #WengerIn community and once responded to criticism from TalkSport's Jason Cundy by warning him not to discriminate against someone "from the hood".
Troopz spoke of surprise Arsenal defeats as though they represented a violation of his human rights, for which someone must be held accountable, if not in The Hague, then at least with the sack. "I don't deserve this, blud!" he cried out in anguish one time, as another season petered out.
Standing against the gloomy consensus was 'Ty', a redoubtable defender of Wenger's legacy who would not tolerate any abuse of his fanbase [this being Ty's own fanbase rather than Wenger's].
The Arsenal Fan TV stable of stars invariably delivered their assessments outside the Emirates Stadium, surrounded by a gathering of rapt fellow supporters loitering in shot, reminiscent of the type that held John Mullane upright after the 2004 Munster final or a group of local TDs flanking the party leader at a campaign stop.
The eventual backlash made this arrangement untenable as the broad mass of more even-tempered Arsenal fans began to grow weary of the histrionics, disquieted by the fact that the channel's growth strategy seemed to be increasingly bound up with Arsenal being sub-standard. [In the same way that 'happiness writes white', a successful football team does not an entertaining fan reaction channel make].
Quite how the caustic Arsenal Fan TV brand would adjust to the disruptive effects of the Gunners suddenly becoming good - a genuinely shocking turn of events - remains to be seen.
The stereotypical Arsenal fan wasn't always characterised by Basil Fawlty-esque impotent frustration.
In Fever Pitch, which covered the length of the 'One-Nil to the Ar-sen-al' era from the late 60s to the early 90s, Nick Hornby claimed that Millwall's 'No One Likes Us, We Don't Care' chant could, with more justice, have been claimed by Arsenal.
He asserted that hardcore fans tended to adopt the personality traits of their chosen clubs. Thus, West Ham fans he knew had an "innate sense of underdog moral authority", while Spurs fans gave off a "smug sense of ersatz sophistication" [he wrote, with full bias].
The club, of course, captured a reasonable chunk of support in this country in the second half of the 1970s, when most of the team were Irish, from either side of the border. Maybe the closest any of us will get to seeing a United Ireland team in competitive action is the '79 FA Cup final.
In Fever Pitch, the Arsenal supporters were portrayed as a spiky bunch, who gloried in siege mentality and reveled in their team's tendency to stifle the opposition.
This changed in the late 90s.
Arsenal's abrupt rise this season carries some echoes of their 1997-98 renaissance. George Graham had won a couple of titles back in the Saint & Greavsie era but come the Sky revolution, they had retreated to the status of a cup team and were mere also-rans in the league.
Then Arsene Who? arrived and proceeded to win the Premier League in his first full season in charge, taking the English game by storm with his new-fangled ideas about ditching steak for pasta and keeping the pint drinking to a relative minimum.
Because of his Frenchness and his stately bearing, Wenger earned a reputation as an intellectual and a sophisticate, though it subsequently emerged that he was a monomaniacal football obsessive who was bemused to learn that there were folks out there who could make a reasonable living from writing books.
To the famous George Graham defence, he added a dose of foreign flair further up the pitch, in the shape of Dennis Bergkamp, Marc Overmars and Nicolas Anelka. This proved unbeatable in '98, as Arsenal overhauled a Manchester United team badly weakened that season by the loss of Eric Cantona [retirement] and Roy Keane [cruciate ligament].
After Anelka departed for Madrid, Wenger found an upgrade in the form of Thierry Henry, and Arsenal collected two more titles, in 2002 and 2004, the latter coming after the famous 'Invincibles' season.
The Gunners became the new media darlings. Smug sophistication was now the preserve of Arsenal fans rather than their despised neighbours. As Hornby later wrote in a Telegraph article in 2012, "My previously dour and unlovable team became a byword for aesthetic perfection."
Champions League glory was the next frontier.
It never quite happened. Wenger's sense of serenity was disturbed by the arrival of Mourinho in London and he cut an agitated figure thereafter.
Renowned Dutch journalist and football writer Simon Kuper once argued that Wenger's fatal mistake, from which his Arsenal regime never really recovered, was to conclude that the entire sport was heading for a catastrophic financial crash in the late 2000s/early 2010s.
At the end of which, as Kuper said, the likes of Chelsea would literally "cease to exist". In this alternate reality, Arsenal, due to the foresight of their prudent and cultured manager, would emerge triumphant amid the wreckage, rather like Celtic did following Rangers' implosion. Things panned out differently.
The fact that Wenger holds an economics degree from Strasbourg puts one in mind of the old joke about how 'of the last three recessions, economists have predicted eight of them'.
Like many an aloof, governing technocrat, Wenger had to listen to the refrain from the masses "Just spend some f***ing money!". In his case, it was on a centre forward rather than the health service.
Wenger's stubbornness to do things his way seemed to increase in proportion to the restlessness of the masses. In the end, the crowd may have had wisdom on their side though.
For the first time in the Premier League era, Arsenal were the biggest spenders in 2021-22.
They followed that up with another splurge last summer. And now here we are, Arsenal leading the league by eight points in mid-January, coursing with momentum and belief. Maybe the cribbers who drove themselves to distraction when lamenting Wenger's frugality had a point after all.
Manchester City may yet get it together and chase them down. Perhaps even a revived Manchester United might, against all odds, preserve their recent record of always winning the title in a season ending in '3'.
But for now Arsenal fans, habitual grumblers for over a decade, are enjoying a rare contentment.
