I’m learning for the first time in nearly 20 years that you only get to bask in a winning football campaign for so long. Inevitably, the next one starts and you find yourself, more than you want to be, back in the moment. Back in the grind of watching your team trying to eke out wins and defend the title.

I did bask. I basked all summer. All during the World Cup, all during the pre-season. I still find myself basking even with the new season being not so new. Best as I can tell, I’m not special. At every match, home or away, we hear Arsenal fans chanting “We know what we are! We know what we are! Champions of England, we know what we are!”

It has been mostly sweet but a little bitter. The new season has come with a few goodbyes to players who were important in achieving our goal. Their replacements are mostly solid but I have little pangs of sadness when I look at videos of how we achieved the title and see players I love no longer among us.

I know, I know. Time to stop looking at videos.

Manager Mikel Arteta disagrees with the phrasing in my first paragraph up there. He says we are attacking the title, not defending it. However, having watched every game of the season–with our solid defending and not-as-impressive attacking–well, it’s entirely possible Arteta knows something about what we’ll be doing at some later point of the season.

“Attacking” the title or no, we are having a good season. With nine games under our belt, Arsenal are narrowly in top position, followed by Manchester City. Recently, it came out that Manchester City were found guilty of 114 of 115 charges against them for running roughshod over financial fair play rules starting in 2010. As the club attempts to appeal the charges, the team has played with defiance for most of the season, dropping points only in the last two matches. At some point it seems likely they will face a substantial points drop, but whether it will be this season or some season in the future is anyone’s guess. Whatever the situation, we have to aim to beat them. And a few other teams that are performing well. Brighton beat both Arsenal and Manchester City and sit in third. I have some confidence they will ultimately be sorted out by the Premier League, but we shall see.

With many managerial changes in the Premier League over the summer, Mikel Arteta at 44 is now the Premier League’s longest tenured manager. As careful as he’s been over the past couple of years to give no ammunition to anyone else about what he really thinks about other teams, what he thinks about refereeing decisions, or the unusual methods he’s deployed to get the best out of the team, he’s had two weeks of hilarious commentary after matches. After a match in which he received a yellow card for leaving the manager’s area, it was reported that he claimed he has files of photographic evidence of other managers leaving their area with no charge. After a match in which an Arsenal defender was extremely lucky not to give up a penalty when pulling back an opponent by the shirt just as he was close to heading the ball into the net, it was reported that Arteta claimed he has files of photographic evidence of defenders doing the same without punishment.

I read a summary of the first comment on social media and thought, “That must be made up.” It was not. Nor was the second one. He really did say that. Leaving us to wonder if he has made his own library of files or, Trump-style, has some hapless “human printer”-like person on staff.

Very little Mikel Arteta can say would make me love him less, even when I can recognize the thing he said requires somewhat blind love. There are photographs and videos a man might possess that would make me rethink my admiration, but these photographs and videos? I can let this slide.

Meanwhile, I have not a single photo of the Emirates while it’s been the home of the champions. Are you tired of me saying so?: Match tickets have been extremely hard to come by. My husband and I have failed in the lottery every match, followed up by failing on the exchange every match. Even for some pretty pedestrian matches. Meanwhile, the price of airfare has been terrible. Even if we had been lucky enough to get tickets, it’s not clear that we would have been able to justify the cost of getting to London.

But all that is about to change. As hard as it’s been to get tickets to any Arsenal home match, it was reasonably easy to get tickets on the exchange for this weekend’s match against Hull City. And airfare was blessedly ok.

There will be pictures.