Cristiano Ronaldo's declaration that he's staying put at Manchester United appears to have brought one of the most tedious transfer sagas in living memory to a close, but excuse Early Doors if it doesn't feel like breaking out the bunting and the fizzy pop.
United fans may be breathing sighs of relief this morning, but the fact remains that Ronaldo's announcement has merely delayed the inevitable.
He'll return from injury at the end of September, all meekness and dedication to the cause, and when the goals start flying in again the United fans will convince themselves that his love for the club has been miraculously rekindled and that the transfer speculation of this summer was all an elaborate ruse concocted by the evil Ramon Calderon and his underlings at Marca.
United could retain the league, they could retain the European Cup, they could score 26 goals past Hull City without reply and be invited to compete in a celestial match in the sky against footballing greats of yesteryear, but Ronaldo will still want to play for Real Madrid because that is his dream.
So next summer the thing will start all over again. Ronaldo will refuse to be drawn on his future, Calderon will make sneering references to "problems between the player and the club", Sir Alex Ferguson will defend "the boy" amid patronising remarks about his head "being turned" by Real's filthy lucre and whichever pneumatically-chested beauties the Portuguese winger happens to be siring at the time will be flouncing all over the front pages of the British tabloids once again.
Don't say you haven't been warned.
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After eventually growing tired of watching videos of freakish female body-builders strutting their stuff on YouTube yesterday, ED decided to check out the opening fixtures of the Olympic women's football tournament.
The women's game has come on leaps and bounds since Sky Sports' Andy Gray and Richard Keys were reduced to a fit of hysterics while discussing a particularly shambolic goalmouth scramble in a mid-1990s women's FA Cup final, and ED was thoroughly entertained by what it saw.
Barring the odd wildly shanked shot and demented goalkeeping foray, the matches bore striking similarities to the men's game, particularly in an age when squeakily-voiced men with long hair and a bewilderingly low pain threshold are increasingly the norm.
There were shocks aplenty on the tournament's opening day as well, with Canada recording their first ever Olympic win against Argentina and reigning champions the USA losing 2-0 to Norway after conceding twice inside the first four minutes.
It was in the Brazil-Germany game, though, that ED's interest was most notably piqued.
An eventful game finished 0-0, but what really caught ED's eye was the performance of Brazilian number 10 Marta, who is widely considered to be the best women's player in the world and possesses a left foot deft enough to perform minor brain surgery.
At one moment during yesterday's game she flicked the ball past the German right-back with the outside of her left foot before whipping in a peach of a cross that her team-mate Cristiane diverted over the crossbar from six yards with what appeared to be her face.
And that disparity in quality is the beauty of women's football.
In the men's game rubbish players are just very occasionally rubbish and will spend most of their time pulling off a passable impression of a half-decent player, whereas brilliant players can go for weeks on end without doing anything remotely eye-catching, thereby providing opinionated pub bores with plenty of ammunition for sweeping "so-and-so is so inconsistent yah" or "so-and-so is massively over-rated yah" statements.
But in women's football, rubbish players are rubbish and brilliant players are brilliant pretty much all the time. Every time Marta gets the ball, you genuinely expect her to shrug off five opposition defenders before curling the ball into the top corner from 45 yards with her left buttock - something which is made all the more likely by the fact the goalkeeper looks as comfortable gathering crosses as she would be gathering live grenades.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Next week there will be a solution. We've given ourselves time to think things over well. We're not close, nor far from reaching a deal, nor somewhere in between." The agent of Valencia midfielder David Silva, on the chances of his client signing a new contract. Good to have that cleared up then.
TALKING POINT: The comments board was positively dripping with bile yesterday, as ED invited nominations for the worst manager in Premier League history.
Paul Jewell (g_hine), Rafael Benitez (mrsims150), Christian Gross (craig.washington), Peter Reid (iansanderson197), Roy Evans (kevin1985kane), Mike Walker (andywalker269), Jacques Santini (jamieasims), Graeme Souness (marcus7aurelio), Alain Perrin (risker15), Sammy Lee (jay8my) and Mick McCarthy (geordieprince1) were all put forward, while lordofjape served up a veritable smorgasbord of managerial misfits in the form of Egil Olsen, Stuart Gray, Steve Wigley, Les Reed, Paul Sturrock and Howard Wilkinson.
Today - Your thoughts on Mr Ronaldo. Glad he's staying? Wish he was going? And is he a deceitful, money-grabbing mercenary or simply a man with a dream? Don't hold back...
COMING UP: Live scoring of Olympic men's football from 10:00 BST, featuring Brazil v Belgium, Ivory Coast v Argentina, and hosts China v New Zealand.
Plus Transfer Talk and live coverage of both the fourth Test from The Oval and golf's US PGA Championship on a day positively bursting out of its undersized pants with sporting action.