The first thing to acknowledge is that the Premier League has been here before. There have been times in the past, most obviously at around this time last year, that Manchester City have looked distinctly mortal. Could it be that they are not, in fact, some supernatural winning machine but just an everyday exceptional side? Certainly at the Emirates on Sunday they did not look like the inevitable champions they did in, say, the two wins over Arsenal last season.
Arsenal still needed a deflected winner, just as they had needed a deflected equaliser to pinch the Community Shield against City on penalties in August. City still edged the game on xG. There was certainly no sense in which Arsenal outplayed City; if this does improbably turn out to be an era-defining defeat, it will have been an unusually humdrum one.
