Tottenham Hotspur won a football match and lost an identity in the cathedral of San Mames when they beat Manchester United in the Europa League final and lifted their first trophy for 17 years.
Flaky Spurs, fragile Spurs, the team that always finds a way to lose, the team that always cracks under pressure, the team that has lent its name to the adjective 'Spursy', so beloved of rival fans, all that is gone now.
'Dr Tottenham will see you now,' other fans laughed. Spurs had that reputation. They could be relied upon to fix your problems by losing to you. Not any more. Not here in northern Spain. This may have been an awful game but Tottenham won it and that was all that mattered.
And so they are a joke no more. And no one can call Ange Postecoglou, their manager, a clown, the label he had raged against the previous evening. Postecoglou, who took charge of his 100th Spurs game here, may lose his job at the end of the season but he has had the last laugh. He won a trophy in his second season, just as he told us he always did.
And so after a season in which they finished 17th in the Premier League and lost 21 games – so far – Spurs will be in the Champions League next season with Europe's elite and the £100m windfall that could bring. They did not look like a team that will fare well in that company but, once more, their fans will not care too much about that. They are losers no more.
For United, there was no consolation. They were abject. Utterly abject. Their performance had no redeeming features. They were an embarrassment to themselves and to their fans, to Sir Alex Ferguson, who was watching in the stands, to their glorious history and to English football.
Heaven knows what fate awaits them now at the hands of Sir Jim Ratcliffe. The players' canteen may well have gruel on the menu next season. This final was their escape hatch, their one shot at climbing out of the mess they have made for themselves but now that has gone.
This defeat will hamper their opportunities to make the signings their manager Ruben Amorim desperately needs to refresh this shambles of a team assembled before he arrived. It is a Frankenstein's Monster of a side.
The struggle to revive United just got a lot harder. This defeat means they will fall further behind teams like Liverpool and Manchester City, who are not subject to the miserable dysfunction that afflicts the Old Trafford regime. This was a zombie final and now United will wander among the undead.
Tottenham had not won a trophy since 2008. Since then, a baker's dozen of English clubs have won a major honour while Spurs have had their nose pressed to the glass, watching others celebrate.
All the other five members of the so-called Big Six have lifted silverware and so have Leicester City, West Ham United, Crystal Palace, Newcastle United, Wigan Athletic, Birmingham City, Swansea City and Portsmouth.
It got to the point some time ago where losing seemed to become part of their DNA. Micky van de Ven said recently that when he joined from Wolfsburg in the summer of 2023, people told him he would be trophyless for the rest of his career. 'We're going to come here and change something,' he said this week.
Spurs fans had taken solace in the fact that they had beaten United three times this season but they also knew that this time they were missing three of their most creative players – Dejan Kulusevski, James Maddison and Lucas Bergvall – from their starting line-up because of injury.
Postecoglou sprang a surprise by leaving Son Heung-min, Spurs' talisman, on the bench and starting with Richarlison instead and it was his team that made the brighter start. Brennan Johnson's cross-shot was beaten out by Andre Onana and, a couple of minutes later, Richarlison pounced on a mix-up between Casemiro and Mason Mount but saw his shot blocked in the six-yard box.
Both sides looked wracked with nerves. Amad Diallo drilled a shot across Guglielmo Vicario and inches wide of the far post but after the opening exchanges, the game sagged. It became a shapeless mess, devoid of creativity and technical assurance, dominated by play-acting and incompetence.
Sometimes it seemed that Bruno Fernandes and Diallo spent more time writhing around on the floor than they did on their feet. It was a thoroughly unappealing spectacle and a horrible advert for the English game. Given the domestic record of these two clubs, perhaps it was unreasonable to expect anything else.
Then, four minutes before the interval, there was a breakthrough. Spurs finally managed to put a cogent move together and Pape Sarr found enough space on the left to curl in a cross with pace and purpose to the near post.
Johnson got in front of Shaw and got a touch on the ball before it hit the England defender and wrong-footed Onana, looping apologetically towards the net as Johnson administered the coup de grace and poked it over the line. It was an ugly goal befitting of the game but the Tottenham fans massed in the end where it was scored could not have cared less.
The start of the second half showed the teams in an even more parlous condition than the first half. It was prehistoric, aimless stuff, balls hoofed into the air, passes misplaced , one foul after another. I have seen better quality matches in League Two this season than this shambles.
It was easy, actually, to feel sorry for some of the United players, in particular. Poor Rasmus Hojlund looks more and more out of his depth, more and more isolated, more and more hapless, with every game that passes. He barely touched the ball. United overpaid hugely for him, of course, so it may be difficult to offload him.
Spurs had a chance to extend their lead midway through the second half but they were not good enough to take it. Yves Bissouma broke down the inside left channel and tried to find Dominic Solanke, who was in space in the middle. But Bissouma overhit the pass and Solanke did not anticipate the ball and it ran away from him and the chance was gone. On the touchline, Postecoglou put his head in his hands.
Richarlison sustained an injury soon after that and was replaced by Son but soon after he had come on, Spurs nearly handed United a way back into the game. Vicario made a complete hash of catching a free kick and when it bounced off his head, it reached Hojlund. Hojlund's header was strong and was sailing towards the net when Van de Ven made a magnificently acrobatic goal-line clearance.
It was Hojlund's final contribution. He was replaced by Joshua Zirkzee and Zirkzee made an immediate impact. He laid a neat ball into the path of Noussair Mazraoui whose cross found Fernandes unmarked eight yards out. Fernandes should have scored but he directed his diving header well wide.
United, finally, started to show signs of attacking life. Substitute Alejandro Garnacho forced a fine one-handed save out of Vicario and Harry Maguire was pushed up front. Maguire up front has worked before for United but it is a familiar sign of desperation.
This time, it did not work. This time, there was no miracle as there had been against Lyon in the quarter-finals. This time there was no reprieve. This was the most important game in their history in financial termas and they blew it.
'Lads, it's Tottenham,' United were famous for saying, implying a sense of wonder that they could be losing to the team from north London. That insult, like so many others, has been wiped away.