I mean, obviously, 0-1 would have been even better, from the season's point of view, and, more importantly, from ours. And, with about 10 minutes to go, one could easily see it going that way, too.
We had spent 80 minutes making Manchester United look pretty wooden and toothless, all in all, on their own ground, give or take a few cameo moments from a revived Wayne Rooney (who looked to me like he was auditioning for something, although I can't for the life of me think what), and the more the clock ran on, the more the stage seemed to be set for one of the very many attacking midfielders that we had on the pitch to stick a goal away and take all three points.
Of course, it didn't quite work out like that, and, in the end, we had to be content with a draw - which, generally speaking, at Old Trafford, for a visiting team, is quite easy to be happy with, although, of course, recent history has taught us to be greedy and set the benchmark a little higher.
Still, if that goalless draw didn't hurt us, it definitely didn't hurt the season, around which the surrounding climate is spectacularly hot at the moment, to say the least. A number of circumstances seem to have combined, in these early weeks, to crank up the hype around the Premier League to new and unprecedented heights - dangerously unsustainable heights, almost certainly.
The arrival in the marketplace of BT Sport, and the panicked response of almost everyone else, means that television (whose tone is infectious) across the board now seems to treat football as if it were some kind of permanent firework display - all big bangs and colourful explosions, all the time. Which, of course, as all football fans know, simply isn't the case.
You wouldn't want to say it in anything louder than a whisper, maybe, in the present atmosphere; but the odd 0-0 here and there, not least between two title-contending sides in a much-vamped early season fixture, can't do any harm, in terms of calming things down a little and restoring some perspective. You could even feel (and again, better only whisper it) that the odd 0-0 kind of returns the game to the people who genuinely like it.
Well done us, then. That goalless draw at Old Trafford wasn't just a decent point, extremely well-obtained in difficult, early-season circumstances. It was a blow for public sanity
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