Pep Guardiola finally set Manchester City free in the Champions League - and he has unleashed a monster.
The Blues have been suffering from an inferiority complex whenever they sit down to eat with the aristocrats at the top table for years.
But they blew that away in 45 super minutes to turn around the semi-final first leg at Paris St Germain and take a 2-1 lead through goals from Kevin De Bruyne and Riyad Mahrez.
Once City get that faith, that they are the best team in Europe, they could be unstoppable.
That sense of being over-awed, and sometimes nervous, was even evident when they faced Lyon - who should not be able to live with the Blues - in last season’s quarter-final.
Guardiola takes some of the blame for that, but they have been the victim of fine margins - rotten luck, away goals, and poor refereeing, ever since they were outgunned by Monaco in 2017.
Guardiola’s decision to give his team their head, and play to their strengths, against PSG seemed to backfire in the first half.
But that was not down to any tactical failing, but more to the opposition’s individual and team quality, and City failing to find rhythm and tempo.
One City stepped it up, in the second half, there was only one winner.
“Stay close to who you are” was the telling Guardiola quote from the press conference on the eve of the match.
His message was clear - this time I put my full trust in the players, and the system that has carried us so far this season.
By matching up to Lyon last season with a 3-5-2 formation last season, Guardiola as good as admitted he could not trust a defence that had been found wanting in the Premier League, and which was short of pace.
A back three of 25-year-old Fernandinho, want-away Eric Garcia and Aymeric Laporte - who had missed most of the season through injury - was a strange starting point for the team.
From then on, City looked unbalanced, although to be fair to Guardiola he could not legislate for Ederson’s errors and Raheem Sterling’s open-goal miss.
As well as not working tactically, with City looking disjointed and uncertain, psychologically it gave Lyon too much respect, for a team that had just finished seventh in the French league.
Changing your set-up to nullify an opponent can give your own players a sense that they should be worrying about the opposition, rather than the other way around.
But Guardiola, as he wryly remarks, is hailed as a genius when his tactical surprises come off, and decried as an over-thinking tinkerman when they don’t.
City fans also watched through their fingers when Guardiola seemed to have done the same thing in the last 16 first leg at Real Madrid last year, asking Gabriel Jesus to do a defensive job on Dani Carvajal, and using Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva as false nines.
That tactical tinker worked like a dream, City breezed through, and Guardiola was a genius once more.
In the 3-0 defeat at Liverpool in 2018 he stuffed his midfield with Fernandinho, De Bruyne, David Silva and Ilkay Gundogan - rather than giving City control, they were over-run in a traumatic first half-hour. Tinker Pep.
He was also accused of over-thinking when he was at Bayern Munich, not least by his own player, Thomas Muller.
The Germany international said Guardiola had a flaw when it came to big games: "He's always a little torn between paying extreme attention and respect to the strengths of the opposition – more so than against smaller teams – and sticking to his convictions and to a system he believes in.”
Guardiola responded to that statement by saying that when a former player says it, you should see it as information, not criticism.
He did not heed the information against Lyon, but in the French capital he cut the concern, relaxed and put his full faith in his team.
City responded to that trust, after 45 minutes in which they were rattled by PSG’s excellence, but still only trailed to a set-piece goal.
But after a welter of criticism in August for that Lyon defeat, Guardiola named a team which basically made a statement - ‘We are Manchester City and we're going to play this game our way, not yours’.
His entire demeanour at the press conference the day before was that of a man who was either very relaxed, or was doing his very best to convince his players he was relaxed.
He talked of how he tends to be calm and confident when his teams get to the semi-final stage, and of telling the squad to treat the game as a friendly.
And he said he wanted them to “Stay close to who you are”.
That was a message for his stars to focus on their own strengths, not worry about the weaknesses.
Those strengths were too much for PSG. Now they just need to complete the job next Tuesday, and Istanbul, and the final, await.
