At some point during the March international break, there was seemingly a line drawn in the sand on this season by Jurgen Klopp and his staff.
While the majority of his players were away with their respective national teams, Klopp shunned the chance for a full week off, one he normally takes when the going is good, and instead got to work on plotting a way back towards the summit of English football.
Asked if he had used the break in play to make some notable in-roads on plans for next season with regards to recruitment, Klopp said; "That is the only thing we do in the international break, apart from have a few days off. The player side [was] positive, I would say. But [it was] talks not decisions - but we are busy."
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At the time, the Reds were sixth in the Premier League and had just been beaten 1-0 by a Bournemouth side who were bottom of the table in their most recent outing. A place in the top four seemed like a pipedream and the rhetoric around the AXA Centre seemed to be about a club whose gaze had been now widened towards what could be achieved next season instead.
"The future has started already, let me say it like this," Klopp said last month, while also admitting: "Next season is already on my mind." While the manager has often cut a relaxed figure in his Friday press conferences - maintaining an even keel for the most part regardless of recent good, bad or indifferent form - the signs are pointing towards someone who is quietly determined to ensure there is no repeat for the 23/24 campaign.
"We tried to give ourselves a chance with a fresh start and a lot of different football things and we had kind of a new start now," Klopp said on Friday. "We had one week or eight or nine days for training and we wanted to use that time to start the new season already. We didn't know where it would lead but it was a breath of fresh air for us."
That Klopp is steeling himself to make sure there is a marked improvement next season is a prospect that should excite Liverpool supporters as they approach a huge summer of rebuilding a squad that is set to shed a handful of big names.
The definitive call to step away from a bidding war for Jude Bellingham - a player who would take up the lion's share of the Reds' transfer kitty this summer - has been taken with a view to spreading the funds across a handful of other midfield options and wherever you stand on that particular viewpoint, it at least suggests Klopp is intent on significantly restructuring in the areas that have cost him this season.
The decision to swap around the two legs of the pre-season schedule, for example, is indicative of a manager who wants his squad up to speed quicker than last summer, where it's since been admitted that mistakes were made from an operational point of view.
"I wouldn’t go in the first week [of pre-season] to Asia," Klopp said in January. "Not because Asia isn’t great, but I wouldn’t go [even] in the third week. But it’s not really in our hands. Is that the reason [for our struggles]? I don’t think so, but it would have been better to do it differently. We learn from these things."
Rather than jet his players out to the Far East for a more commercially-driven jaunt prior to building up the real base levels of fitness at a European-based training camp later in the summer - a schedule that contributed towards muscle injuries for Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Diogo Jota - Klopp is said to be steadfast in his belief that those problems are far less likely to be encountered if the long-haul journeys are undertaken after a summer camp in Germany this time out.
The decision to bring forward Thiago Alcantara's surgery in an effort to have him ready to report for duty at the start of pre-season is another indicator that Liverpool's thought process is very much about the long-term benefits that can be gleaned as they attempt to contest for a Premier League title once more next season.
Another would be the recent tactical tweak that has seen Trent Alexander-Arnold become a de facto central midfielder whenever in possession after years of being the creative fulcrum at right-back.
That the plan was only rolled out when top-four hopes looked to have faded suggests it was something that was - or is - being looked at in less pressurised environments where points are not necessarily as essential as they usually might be. It is an experiment that is at least yielding results with the No.66 flourishing as one of the Premier League's outstanding players over the last month.
Strangely, though, while Klopp and his team have been keeping more than one eye on how they can steal a march in time for the new season, they have propelled themselves into the mix for something tangible at the end of this one. Six successive wins and an eight-game unbeaten run has taken them to within a point of Manchester United in fourth.
The Red Devils still have a game in hand to negotiate but given the difficulties encountered across the last nine unpredictable months, that supporters still have hope to grasp in the final weeks represents something in itself.
And if Liverpool do come up short in their Champions League chase, they can at least rest safe in the knowledge that plans for both a critical summer and next season as a whole have been underway for quite some time already.
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