Only for Kalvin Phillips' sake, I reckoned, should we be trying to remember anything about the otherwise numb blank of the Cardiff game, not letting a happy moment be buried by the bitterness all surrounding it. But it has only worked out that way now thanks to the Yorkshire Pirlo himself.
Haaland's serenity is frightening in certain lights, like the bloke sitting placid in his pub corner for years, who one day starts smashing pint glasses over his own head.
What we do, as fans of football or music, is strange. It's getting stranger. And it's amazing how often it isn't what we want. Some fans want a new Rihanna album and some want Leeds United to win the league, but we'll all settle, in the meantime, for thinking about what they're both wearing.
One of the summer's big questions, about the defence post-Pontus Jansson, has been answered in the first weeks of the season by the PFA-award winning form of young loanee Ben White. But it's Liam Cooper who has truly replaced Jansson, and is playing better than he did.
The reminiscences of Bates in Steve Dale's actions shouldn't make Leeds fans glad to see it happening to someone else, even if that's our first instinct. Instead we should be furious that, in more than ten years, nobody in charge of football has come up with a way to stop this happening.
Salford City is a cosplay football club; Ferguson, the Nevilles, Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt watching players pretending to be Manchester United, acting out a live-action roleplay rivalry against a team they've never played before, but with whom the script dictates they have history.
It turns out that where the rest of us see problems at Leeds United, Marcelo Bielsa sees solutions. And the solutions he sees are among the reasons why people call him El Loco; to anyone else they'd be mad.
Victor Orta was trying a Big Brother experiment last season, throwing loads of twenty-somethings in a building and seeing who doesn't break down, but those who graduated to Bielsa's dorm-rooms, video-rooms and round-the-clock attention are not the headlit rabbits we watched freezing last season.
Imagine turning up to the first home match of the biggest promotion attempt in years, and seeing Vinnie Jones is sitting on the bench, and Mickey Thomas is starting. Maybe that's the real reason fans were smashing windows.
Few players do less to hide their emotions: when Pontus Jansson is happy, he runs to the fans and punches the air, and when he's sad, he turns his entire face upside down and glooms away down the tunnel. If there's any doubt how he's feeling, there will be an Instagram post explaining it.