One-nil to the Arsenal, and the relief is palpable. It was desperately close and not remotely good for the constitution, but we dragged ourselves over the line to fourth and into the final Champions League spot. That's the 16th time in a row we have qualified for it.
We have arrived at the breathless finale, and it could go anywhere. Same as last year, then.
The Wigan game was no doubt fantastic for the neutral ebbing and flowing like the tides but it was hard work for the partisan until the triple-goal salvo. But here we are again and I have no idea what I think, if I'm honest.
I think I would perhaps be enjoying this fourth-place run-in a bit more if Arsenal were a little less in the wanting zone. I'm finding it hard to prefer this new-found gritty football ('unremarkable' as the Independent have it, though they also admired our ruthlessness) over its free-flowing predecessor.
What will posterity tell us about this game? Not, I suspect, that it was a curiously below-par performance despite an 80-minute numerical advantage. History will record it as a win. Three potentially crucial points for supremacy among the title unchallengers.
An 86th minute penalty that opened the floodgates in one otherwise tight game, followed by a tight draw full of varying forms of promise but deficient in the goal department to the tune of any. I suspect this is how the rest of the season's going to be hard to predict, nervy. Walking over teams and seeing them off into the distance with a merry wave tends not to be our way and with a fair bit at stake, I'm not convinced we're going to waltz gloriously past anyone over the next six games.
A few days from it all does wonders for your soul and it transpires that Arsenal haven't done so badly in my absence either, with an I'm-away record of P2 W2 F6 A2. Perhaps I should leave the metropolis more often.
In fact, we've now won five out of six league games, a very decent and needed run of form ruined only by a time-honoured Defence-o-Wobble up at our friendly neighbours.
I like to think that this is the very machine that our merry gang of defenders sat down in front of the other day in a bid to fix things defensively. You see, Arshavin, when he was trying to find a copy of his contract in the basement, had stumbled upon it in the storeroom that contains, amongst other things, George Graham's old scarf, a somewhat dishevelled Glenn Helder and Paul Merson's pool cue.
Optimism is not an emotion I have much associated with this stuttering season, during which all our weaknesses have been laid bare on far too many occasions, but I have been in a curiously upbeat mood since our ultimately futile win in Bavaria.
I thought we'd win in Swansea – based on nothing but the clutching of straws, probably but my bullishness had started to fizzle out by the middle of the second half.
I've been pretty down on all things Arsenal recently. Down on our chances, down on writing this blog, down on everything. Down on wages, down on the ticket prices, down on some of the players, down on the crest (still think it's crap). Down on Le Boss. Now look, things could go wrong again tomorrow don't I just know it but right now that Bayern game has reinvigorated me.
And so it came to pass, as they said in the olden days (along with other common but now old-fashioned phrases like ‘Willlttttttooooooord!' and ‘it's up for grabs now'). We lost the derby and I went into hiding and swore a vow of blogging silence. That, at least, is this week's feeble excuse. Honestly, how Arseblogger and other Arsenal bloggers do this every day at the moment – well ever, really, but especially at the moment remains beyond my comprehension.
Oops. Two weeks have zipped past with nary a word. There are mitigating factors, though. Straight after the Blackburn game I took a wrong turn in Chipping Barnet and ended up 6,000 miles away, and as luck wouldn't have it, it was the middle of the day when we played Bayern and I was in a meeting. I now have an increased admiration for any global lunatics who follow the Arsenal before breakfast, after the pubs have closed or in the middle of the night.
So I voiced my inner fears in yesterday's preview with these words:
"The effects of a disjointed performance and a cup exit on the players, the fans, on pretty much everyone, do not bear thinking about."
Well we're now having to bear thinking about it, because a disjointed performance is exactly what we got, utterly blunt and operating at about 60% of the required urgency until it was too late.
I might as well just wheel out my ‘I love the FA Cup' article again, mightn't I? I do love the FA Cup. Did I ever mention that?
And now we're approaching the business end of it – win today's fifth round and it's the quarter-finals. That has the word finals in it. Maybe at this point I should throw in a gem of a stat, one that you've not heard before.
Backs-to-the-wall, fighting spirit, riding our luck, throwing our bodies at everything, defiance &c. (And I'll skate over ‘missing a hatful in the first half').
Yes, there's something deeply satisfying about a one-nil away win in these kinds of circumstances, where at the end of the game the shirt colour can be described as ‘off-brown' and Szczesny's back has huge bruises on from being patted so hard and so often by his teammates.
When Kieran Gibbs pulled up on Wednesday night, clearly crocked, little could we know that that one split second, that sprained thigh, would cost the club £8m. Because I think it's fair to say that had Gibbs been roaming the Emirates pastures happy as punch at the end of the Liverpool game, Wenger would not have signed anyone this transfer window.
