Vitor Orta's glorious binoculars gag, Andrea Radrizzani's awakening and Marcelo Bielsa's dream - Daniel Chapman

Victor Orta was very, very committed to his binoculars gag at Pride Park.

He didn’t just hold them up for a moment. The point might have been lost. He climbed to a vantage point where he could see and be seen. He held up the binoculars he had bought and brought with him, putting them to his eyes. With his whole body devoted to the joke, he tilted and swayed and wiggled and he did it again and again and again.

It was glorious.

I can’t look back and say that I’m glad we lost to Derby in the play-offs last season. I can’t say that the last 16 years outside the Premier League have been worth it. I can’t be positive about the pain and the heartache that following Leeds United has caused us since 2004.

For a long, long time we forgot that we were supposed to be having fun. But I’m glad that Victor Orta went through at least part of the story, that he had to suffer the likes of Paul Heckingbottom like the rest of us before hiring a dream.

I’m glad that Marcelo Bielsa went back to his flat after the play-offs feeling how we all felt, understanding the phrase ‘typical Leeds’. That Jackie Harrison and Pat Bamford knew failure at the end of their first season, that we’d known for more than a decade. That Andrea Radrizzani learned why the fans of the club he’d bought were all so agitated, all the time.

That seemed hard for Radrizzani to understand at first. He asked for fans to be patient, which was reasonable because he was just starting his work.

But he didn’t know then that the fans’ patience had snapped long before he came to Leeds. He began to realise, and now winning the Championship will be all the sweeter for him, too, after tasting some of the sour.

The song says we’ve been through our ups and downs together and that’s been an important part of this season. Maybe there’s an easier way to get promoted, by spending millions on a massive squad, or even one with more than three defenders.

But that squad might not have had Liam Cooper and Gaetano Berardi in it, two players who arrived in Massimo Cellino’s first summer, whose first coach was Dave Hockaday, who have lived every second of the struggle as hard as the fans. I’m glad it was them.

“To love, and being loved,” Bielsa said last season, “is more important than winning and success.” After a team is successful, he said: “We don’t remember the games won, but we remember the behaviours, the anecdotes.

“We remember those we learned to admire,” – Stuart Dallas. “Or others we didn’t admire that much,” – Derby County Football Club?

Bielsa was, as usual, right. The pandemic meant we had to keep our distance from the ghost games that won the Championship, and placed more focus on what we could see of the players through social media and TV. Sure, we’ll remember Michael Sollbauer’s own goal. But Victor’s binoculars and Mateusz Klich’s breakdancing will be replayed much more often.

Klich is one of the players we’ve learned to admire. While Bielsa takes the acclaim for the team’s style, the players deserve endless credit for their effort and dedication not only playing for him, but training and eating and waking and sleeping every day to support his ideals. Players like Klich, Dallas, Cooper and Luke Ayling were perfect for Bielsa, not only for how they could play, but for what he found in their characters.

With more of their careers behind them than ahead, Bielsa trusted they would have the desire and dedication to give everything they had, in pursuit of everything they set out as kids playing football to achieve.

Those players learned, as young men, that football was not as easy as it looks, leaving their dreams behind for lesser clubs and lower divisions. When Marcelo Bielsa came to them and made football even harder, they were prepared to do whatever it took.

It took a lot, not just in effort but in sorrow at the end of last season.

But what a moment at the end of this one. To love, and being loved: the players have had a weekend of it, and they’ll have it with Leeds for the rest of their lives.

“I’m too much in love with my players,” Bielsa said last year. “Before sleeping, when I imagine us playing against Liverpool, I always imagine us beating them.”

A manager and players who dream what we dream. In the end, that’s what we needed to make our dreams come true