How were those seven added minutes for you? I’m currently ranking them as the longest seven minutes of my life. Extra-time and penalties might even have felt shorter. I don’t know about hiding behind the sofa; there was a moment round about minute four of the seven when I was wondering about rolling up the carpet and putting myself under the floorboards.

Which wouldn’t have been a bad idea because then I would have missed that Mahrez shot and my life expectancy, according to qualified medical estimates, would currently be approximately four and a half years longer than it now stands.

Seven minutes! When I think what the sight of that board did to my legs… And I was sitting down. What must it have done to those players of ours – right on the verge of a potentially career-defining achievement, close enough to touch it, only to see it recede into another temporal dimension?

But of course, we know what it did to their legs, and to them in general. It just added a bit more steel, because that’s what they’re like. They didn’t buckle, they stood strong when it mattered, they went the extra seven minutes, and they contrived to bring about the happiest possible ending to the strangest ever season. We really can’t thank them enough.

In retrospect, perhaps it was already won, in fact, and we were all just waiting for confirmation. As the clock was running down, I noticed, of course, City’s Kyle Walker turning into a latter-day Rory Delap and resorting at least twice to long throws. But I did not notice, in the moments before that – as journalist Rory Smith did in the New York Times in far and away the best piece written about what happened on Saturday night - Walker heading to the touchline in search of instruction from his manager and then appearing to look a little drained at what he was being told to do. For Pep Guardiola, it seemed, was instructing him to sling it into the mixer. Which in turn, surely, meant the game was finally up.

Guardiola, you will need no reminding, is one of the chief architects of a style of Spanish football which, never mind resorting to long throws, barely even lowers itself to resorting to corners unless it really has to, and only then with a peg on its nose. Yet there we were, minutes from the end of a Champions League final, with Walker giving the ball the famous old shirt-based polish and stepping as far back from the touchline as he could go, ready to go long with a heave-ho throw.

As a friend and fellow Chelsea fan wondered, was there more going on here than met the eye? Was it more sophisticated than that - tactically devious in ways we humble spectators perhaps don’t yet understand? This was Pep Guardiola, after all. It must have been a false long throw, my friend argued. Slinging it into the false mixer.

Well, maybe. In which case, watch out for next season when Pep potentially gets hold of Harry Kane and starts using him as a false big man up top to knock it falsely long to.

Out-thought, out-played, defeated: that’s what City were on Saturday night, and what a monumental team performance it was that brought it about. How do you even begin to tweezer a Man of the Match out of the meshed contributions of Edouard Mendy, Reece James, Cesar Azpilicueta, Andreas Christensen when he replaced Thiago Silva, Toni Rudiger, Ben Chilwell, N’Golo Kante, Jorginho, Mason Mount, Timo Werner and Kai Havertz?

But yes, someone’s got to have it, and tradition dictates that it can’t be Thomas Tuchel, so let’s give it to Kante, like everyone else did.

Gary Lineker on BT Sport got out the old but still glistening line about how water covers 71 percent of the earth’s surface while the rest of it is covered by N’Golo Kante, and that line will never not be a classic. But the match also prompted a new meme regarding the best midfield-threes of the modern era: Xavi, Iniesta and Busquets at Barcelona, Casemiro, Kroos and Modric at Real Madrid… and N’Golo Kante of Chelsea.

Current state of his trophy shelf: the World Cup, the Champions League, the Europa League, two Premier League titles and the FA Cup. All of that in five years. His reward during Saturday night’s celebrations was to become the only object carried around the pitch more than the trophy itself. Again, we can’t thank him enough.

And yes, Timo Werner might have had two goals in that first half, but it’s his run that drags off Ruben Dias to the right, opening up that space down the middle where Mason Mount can play the absolute and utter pass of the season to Kai Havertz – that space, incidentally, where City would conventionally have had a defensive midfielder if two defeats to Thomas Tuchel in the preceding six weeks alone hadn’t monkeyed so riotously with their preparations.

‘Mind games’ are football’s most painfully inflated stock, and very often appear to have no kind of value at all in the real world outside of discussions between pundits. Indeed, there’s a respectable school of thought which argues that mind games don’t actually exist in any usefully measurable form and were invented on the hoof by representatives of the media when they eventually ran out of ways to praise Sir Alex Ferguson.

But the kind of mind game played by our manager, where you beat your opponent in the run-up to the big game – preferably twice, and preferably twice inside a little more than a month… well, that’s a notion of mind games that all of us, I’m sure, will happily buy into.

And it takes a certain kind of mind to play that kind of mind game. We have a brilliant manager and a brilliant group of players, and doesn’t it feel good to think about that? To play seven Champions League knock-out games and concede only two goals… To play Manchester City three times in a little over a month and find a way to triumph on every one of those occasions… To win the Champions League when the draw has made obstacles out of the best team in England and the top two teams in Spain…

You know what? Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually go to the ground on a regular basis and watch those players play, and watch that manager manage? You know – the way we used to. Can you imagine? Wouldn’t that really cap it all?

Hang on a moment… maybe soon we can.