A north London derby, a 4-0 win, a WSL attendance record and, all being well, the promise of five more Emirates Stadium matches to come before the season is out.
As starters go, this one was fairly meaty, the kind that would have you glancing nervously at the set menu as the plates were cleared, doubtful of having the stomach for the delights to come, were it not, of course, for the fact that the collective appetite for women’s football has never been greater.
Beth Mead, certainly, did not hesitate to indulge, opening the scoring after just five minutes (“I should have scored two minutes earlier”) and then departing once it was complete to a half-lap of honour, a slow-motion Mexican wave of adulation as chairs flipped up and the Emirates rose in ritual salute of its European Champion, confirming its wholesale indoctrination into the cult of Meado.
“I knew people would wind me up, saying I was milking it!” Mead tells Standard Sport, though the moment was actually the product of some pernickety officiating.
“I tried to go across the pitch to waste time a little bit but the referee told me to go off the other side,” she explains.
“The response I got was incredible, I’ve never felt anything like that. I had goosebumps. It was an emotional moment because for that many people to stand up and applaud you… I’m just playing football! It was insane.”
The challenge already for Arsenal is to ensure that as many of the 47,367 who turned out at the Emirates on Saturday do so again when Jonas Eidevall’s side return. That could be next month, when the Gunners will play the first of three home Champions League group stage matches at the ground — if they overcome Ajax in Amsterdam tonight, after drawing the first leg of their qualifier 2-2 last week.
“We obviously want to win but we need to win,” Mead says, though she insists the carrot of more games at the Emirates cannot be the Gunners’ chief motivating factor. “You’ve got to be tunnel vision and concentrate on that game and whatever the outcome, the rest will come after that.
“A team such as Arsenal, we have to be playing on that stage. That’s why people play for Arsenal: they want to play in the Champions League and they want to compete on that level.”
The 27-year-old is too humble to admit it, but, after her summer heroics, she is now one of the planet’s leading players, too good, surely to be absent from club football’s biggest tournament.
Mead is fully embracing what she calls “the perks of winning a European Championship”, happy to be recognised more often in the street and helped by the support of partner and Arsenal team-mate Vivianne Miedema, who has carried an elevated, superstar profile for some time.
“Viv’s dealt with that for years and she’s also won a European Championship,” says Mead, who, refreshingly, sees no need to invest in the park-it-and-move-on mentality that so often prevails in high-performance sport.
“We all have our coping mechanisms, but I’ll be riding on the high of winning that Euros for the rest of my life. That’s because we did something amazing. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be fully focused on everything else but I’m also allowed to enjoy living on that memory.”
Someone paid for my meal to congratulate me - they’d already walked away and, to this day, I don’t know who it was.
She accepts that when things go pear-shaped — say, failing to qualify for the Champions League group stage — criticism will be more intense but says that is “part and parcel” of “the level we want the game to go to”.
Similarly unfamiliar is the scale of commercial interest. Mead has an autobiography due for release in November, a beer named after her and is talking to Standard Sport at an event in partnership with WHOOP, a wearable technology brand which uses a traffic light system to monitor recovery and strain (the morning after the Euros final, she says, “there was no sleep data and there was very much a big red circle there”).
The moment Mead became most aware of her transformed standing, however, came on holiday last month.
“Someone on another table paid for my meal to congratulate me,” she says. “They’d already walked away and, to this day, I don’t know who that person is.”
Perhaps, the mystery benefactor was among those in attendance at the Emirates on Saturday. If so, they will surely be back for seconds.
