It would be an extraordinary feat — only five clubs were below them at the start of December — not least because when he sat down in June to survey the wreckage of relegation and the threat of administration, Kevin Blackwell had a squad comprising precisely two senior players. That he has cobbled together a team of graduates and dropouts now only four points off the play-offs zone is one of the managerial feats of this or any other season.

No doubt beaming all the way back to tax exile in Monaco was Ken Bates, the new chairman, whose belt-tightening has included a ban on champagne in the boardroom (Moët & Chandon now means two French full backs signed on loan), but Hulse was gleefully clutching a bottle of it as he relived his man-of-the-match performance. A season previously restricted to seven goalless substitute appearances for West Bromwich Albion had clearly built up a well of frustration that was released in the two coruscating shots that fizzed past Marcus Hahnemann in the space of seven second-half minutes. But for a brilliant save from the Reading goalkeeper, who tipped a header on to the crossbar, Hulse would have been celebrating a hat-trick. He was not about to bemoan his luck.

“It’s a great start and a massive relief to be back playing football again,” Hulse, who turned down a permanent move to Stoke City and temporary assignments with a clutch of other Coca-Cola Championship sides to join Leeds until the end of the season, said. “It’s been an emotional 12 months with injuries and not playing. After ten minutes I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m not going to make half-time’ and after 70 my calves were screaming (he eventually limped off with cramp). I think adrenalin got me through.” Why Leeds when he could have joined any number of more stable clubs? “You only have to look round at the history.”

History is something that Reading, who have never reached the top flight, can still make, although their form (four draws, three defeats and only two goals in seven matches) suggests that the team who topped the table in September will do well to regroup and make the play-offs. They had their chances against Leeds — Nicky Forster at the start of the first half, Les Ferdinand, who volleyed over an open goal, at the start of the second — and eventually scored through Lloyd Owusu at the death, but they possessed neither the hunger nor the sharpness of their opponents. An early blunder involving Ibrahima Sonko and Ivar Ingimarsson allowed David Healy to put Leeds in front and Hulse, a man on a mission, put them out of their misery with two unstoppable shots from 18 yards.

Such has been the misery at Elland Road that no one was proclaiming a new dawn, only one bright afternoon during the most relentlessly gloomy two years in the club’s history. After all, it was only four years ago yesterday that Leeds were preparing to take on Anderlecht on their way to the European Cup semi-finals, having progressed from one group containing Barcelona and AC Milan, then another featuring Real Madrid and Lazio.

And as if to emphasise the point that the future remains far from settled, there was a warning from Bates that, only 22 days after completing his £10 million takeover, “consortia and syndicates . . . with a view to ‘saving’ the club” are “beginning to surface again”. Bates wrote of “mysterious middlemen representing funny foreign financiers . . . property carpetbaggers who see the redevelopment opportunity by kicking United out of Elland Road”. The only certainty about life at Leeds these days is, it seems, that it will be uncertain.