Speaking as a Jewish Gooner, I can assure you: I never lost faith

I am now 48. And we have just won the Premier League for the first time since.

Twenty-two years. A clock that’s been ticking for most of my adulthood. What else have you waited 22 years for? This isn’t just a game. This is life, played out in red and white instalments, I got married in those 22 years. I now have four children. Not one of them has ever seen Arsenal win a league title. Until now.

In his seminal work, Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby (the bard of N5) wrote that "the natural state of a football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score”. And for my kids, that disappointment is on me. I put Arsenal shirts on small children who had no say in the matter, sat them down for big matches with false promises that "this could be our year," and watched their faces fall when it wasn't. Their grandfathers support Chelsea. But for my intransigence, they could have had it all and more by now.

But we pass these things on from generation to generation. Faith. Tradition. Belonging. It’s not just about the winning, is it?

When Wenger left, I found myself trying to articulate what he had actually given us. And I realised it wasn't just the football, beautiful as it was. It was an understanding.

Arsène Wenger taught us that we don't just support a team, we are part of a club.

A living, breathing tribe that belongs to no single person. Not the manager, not the players, not the owner. It is bigger than all of them. It is passed down, inherited and handed on.

Of course there are custodians of the religion, but no one individual who embodies the religion itself. For every Abraham and Moses there is an Arsene and Mikel. Figures who define eras. Who carry the tradition forward in ways not previously experienced.

But the thing they carry is older than them and will outlast them. There is and always will be The Arsenal.

That said, this season nearly broke us all. We led the league for over 200 days and then in the space of a fortnight in April it looked like the old story was writing itself once more (second again ole ole). We Arsenal fans are exhausting. The group chats went into mourning. If there was a trophy for catastrophising we’d win it every year.

But this time was different.

As the title was being won in absentia on the south coast, three of my kids were at home with me. The fourth, my eldest, at university in Leeds, doesn’t watch much football. But on a Tuesday night in May, she was watching Bournemouth vs Manchester City on her iPad. Just in case. And as the final whistle went we realised that the wait had been worth every minute.

We drove to the Emirates. An impromptu pilgrimage of sorts.

There was no game. No event. Nothing organised. But as we got closer there were horns honking from every direction, music pouring from car windows (“North London forever…”), and thousands upon thousands of people, together. Faces you see every week. Faces you've never seen before in your life. All of them there for the same reason. To sing, to hug strangers, to share the moment.

That is what football is. Not ninety minutes. Not a league table. Not even a trophy. It's the belonging and the hope. And it turns out that hope, or at least hope fulfilled, is the whole point.

That’s why I handed this down to my kids. Why I put them through the hurt and the despair and the waiting. Because of nights like this. And whatever else happens and no matter how long the next wait is, they know one thing for sure.

There is and always will be The Arsenal.

At the time of writing, Arsenal are still to play Paris Saint Germain in the Champions League. The author accepts no responsibility for what another win might do to him.