Consider this grim set of figures.
When Everton, briefly, climbed to fourth in the table after a well-earned draw at Old Trafford in early October, Newcastle United were second bottom and still winless.
Fast-forward four months and the 11 points, and chasm in the standings, which separated the two sides has almost evaporated.
It has all but vanished because just one place and one point now keeps these two teams apart.
Frank Lampard said he came into the Everton job with his 'eyes open' to the predicament but, in so many ways, he would rather not have seen this.
But for the sake of the season, it was better that he did. However hard it will have been to watch.
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If Saturday, at a raucous and rejuvenated Goodison Park, was the near-perfect start to his reign as manager then this, at St James' Park in his first league game as boss, was nightmarish.
The win over Brentford was a triumphant anomaly. This was the brutal truth of what's been going on.
So much of what had been excellent and energetic against Brentford was forgotten here, left in the hold of the team's chartered flight from John Lennon Airport, as Everton fell to an all too familiar defeat - the type that has taken them from those heights in October, to only three points outside of the bottom three.
Everton are, as Lampard knows all too well, just a Norwich City win away from being in an even bigger mess than they are already.
Goal-difference remains on their side but it won't be for much longer, if they ship goals as softly as this.
How has it come to this, by the way, that we are left to grasp onto the fact that Everton would remain outside of the drop zone because of a superior goal difference?!
Such talk, back in October after the point against Manchester United, would have been hysterically laughed off.
Nobody is laughing now.
Least of all a stony-faced Lampard who saw his side take the lead, give up it within 60 seconds, and then lose all composure.
In the second half, Everton offered that potent concoction of little resistance at the back and next to no threat upfront. It only ends in one way when you do.
The Blues got what they deserved here and their situation has become that bit more perilous.
Like Rafa Benitez before him, injuries have already done Lampard no favours inside just two games in charge, with Demarai Gray and Yerry Mina joining Ben Godfrey on the treatment table, and when Everton were chasing the game, he didn't have the option to throw on Dominic Calvert-Lewin having already used up his subs.
It truly was a night in Everton's season where there was nothing to hang onto. It was a bad evening and a damaging result, which piles even more pressure onto the visit of Leeds United on Saturday.
Lampard must hope to garner the type of reaction that helps whip Goodison into a frenzy, in four days' time because, boy, do the players need the fans.
The natives here, this evening, bounced out of St James' Park and into the night fully believing their team will survive. The Evertonians, high up in the stands, filed back onto the coaches with worry weighing heavy on their minds.
Lampard will join them in being concerned. He has 17 games to make sure the worst doesn't happen but he won't need reminding that the Blues cannot afford to lose games with Burnley, Watford, Leeds and Brentford in the coming weeks and months.
Dele Alli and Donny van de Beek came off the bench to make their debuts and the new manager is certain they will improve the team. Calvert-Lewin's return to full fitness, too, cannot come soon enough. And he will be holding onto what he saw at Goodison on Saturday to give him belief that nights such as this can be avoided.
But the rest, pretty much is what Benitez had to contend with.
Lampard says he wanted to have no preconceptions about the squad before and having watched recent games, he identified a lack of confidence as one of the big problems.
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But, as he witnessed tonight, the issues run deeper and wider than self-belief. Time remains on his side but the season has gone past halfway and important games are coming up, so he needs to eradicate all that was wrong in this, a 12th loss of the season. And all that has been wrong, bar the Arsenal game, since Everton went into fourth after taking a point at Old Trafford.
The slide has been rapid. Newcastle have taken 15 points since that weekend. The Blues only five. Five points in four months. Everton's form has been so bad it's hardly believable.
Mid-way through the second period, as Everton trailed 2-1, Jordan Pickford sliced a clearance high into the Newcastle night before Jarrad Branthwaite did the same as the ball dropped from above, cannoning it off his shin and sending it for a corner.
Lampard kept his cool but turned away from the scene of the crime and took a swig from his bottle of water. Nights like this, as an Evertonian, make you want to reach for something stronger.
And so if the new man soaked up everything that is great about this club, and could see and feel the potential around him, he was exposed to the opposite this evening.
The reality is so much different to the oasis that was Saturday's FA Cup win. His eyes are open to the situation but this defeat has made him see things that, perhaps, he didn't know were there.
