The short and grievous history of the Premiership, with all its tales of greed, thuggishness, skulduggery, envy, overweening pride, vicious chippiness, frank cheating, appalling behaviour, obnoxiousness and soul-deep conceit has at least produced one perfect season: and for that, it has all been worth it.

In fact, there were times when it seemed worth it for a single match, or a single goal. Because you don’t find perfection very often in any sport, let alone football, but football does have that strange knack of opening vistas of brilliance.

It is sustaining this brilliance that is so difficult. I would have said it was impossible, were it not for the fact that in 2003-04, Arsenal did it. They sustained their brilliance for a season: they were not beaten from August until May, they won the title with insolent ease, and they did so not only brilliantly but beautifully.

It was a team created in the image of Thierry Henry. If anyone ever asks for a justification of the Premiership and its awfulness, the answer is Henry, and in particular, Henry in that single season. Or perhaps Henry in a single match in that season.

In April, Arsenal played hosts to Liverpool, having been dumped out of the Champions League and the FA Cup, and, with their season at a point of crisis, fell behind 2-1. They won 4-2 and Henry had three of them.

It was beautiful, they were beautiful, he was beautiful. I know, we all know that football is not about aesthetics. But everyone who watches football knows that there are two ways of watching football: one is through the grossness of partisanship while the other involves, at least in part, a lust for beauty.

And for a year, Arsenal and Henry brought us the game at its most beautiful. From the rough and tumble of a league season, Henry rose time and again to strike reverential disbelief into all who watched. There have been players as fast as Henry, players as skilful as Henry, players as graceful as Henry: but never all three at once.

Henry in his pomp was almost literally dazzling: the combination of speed and skill and vision was at times capable of baffling the eye. Nor were his skills ever used self-indulgently: he was never like those minor artists, content to express his talents in a meaningless form.

No, his medium was goals, and he scored (and almost as often, set them up) them with style and skill and beauty. Above all with panache. You need a French word for Henry: for there was never any question of him becoming an honorary Englishman. He didn’t play like an English footballer; he didn’t think like an English footballer. So much so that he even looked cool while making tacky adverts for a naff little car. He always had a style, but as he set the tone for Arsenal’s greatest season, he combined style with substance in a way that no one has ever done before in English football.

It was not to be sustained. It was miracle enough that it lasted for a full season. The entire Arsenal side were robbed of their identity in one pizza-laden afternoon at Old Trafford, when the Invincibles were vanquished at last. They were never the same again.

Patrick Vieira, the team’s captain and enforcer, moved on, and Henry became the club captain. It didn’t work out: Henry was too insubstantial a figure, too vain, too self-preoccupied, to have the stuff of leadership in him. Arsenal fell away and while Henry continued to give intermittent delight, and was, at least when fit, a central figure in everything Arsenal attempted, the moment has passed.

Henry was never truly able to cope with no longer being an Invincible. Something of himself died in the Battle of the Buffet, and something in Arsenal died as well. He remains a fabulous footballer, but always with a feeling that we have had the best of him.

Football is more inclined to live in its uncomfortable hurly-burly present than in the half-remembered glories of the past: and all Arsenal’s thoughts will be about the next season, the way forward, the beginning of life After Henry.

But those of us with wider vision can afford to look back, and if we are supporters of the most important team in football, that of Club Excellence, we can understand, not as a matter of misty-eyed nostalgia but of hard fact, that in the Premiership, there once was a team and an individual that did, indeed, touch perfection. For a while, anyway.