Norwich City had joined football's marginalised and forgotten, where newspapers dust off prints of old Milk Cup triumphs and awful haircuts to feed football's love of pathos. The ill-equipped have their moments and then drop away to the fringes – psychological and geographical – where tumbleweed blows through dreams, or the urge to rise again sparks a revival.

The Canaries are coming out of their coalmine. With an 89th-minute winner from Chris Martin, they opened up an 11-point lead in League One over second-placed Leeds United, who have faltered so badly since their fine FA Cup run that they can now hear Millwall's winged chariot drawing near.

These two members of the Premier League's Captain Oates club are on wildly diverging paths. With eight games left Norwich look certainties for automatic promotion while Leeds are writing a fresh chapter in the self-immolation manual they penned during the Peter Ridsdale years.

It helps if the substitute you send on in added time to save the game stays on for more than 60 seconds. Tresor Kandol must have set some kind of record by being sent off for violent conduct inside a minute. In the roughhouse of first v second, Leeds' machismo left them short while sunnier, prettier Norwich could start planning for the Championship.

Here are two clubs running away from the disgrace of multiple relegations. Norwich have won 23 of their past 29 league games, while Leeds have gathered only 15 points from as many outings in 2010.

The Canaries have been on a classic English switchback ride. They are a fanatically supported community club who are thriving on the pitch and debt-shackled in the boardroom, where arrears of £23m would provoke the displeasure of the new subsidy-intolerant Uefa. A Premier League side five years ago, Norwich crashed through the Championship before writing a revival script in the third tier. And naturally the bright young manager responsible for this radiance is so successful that predators threaten to reach down through the divisions and pluck him out.

When Tony Mowbray was sacked last week, it was a certainty that the Celtic old boy Paul Lambert would be touted for the job. "Hypothetical questions don't really bother me one bit," he told the Norwich Evening News, sounding, as all coveted managers do, like Jim Hacker being asked about No 10. He also said "I love it here and my main job is to get this team out of this league", which leaves open the possibility of a summer departure should Neil Lennon not be awarded the Celtic post full-time.

A passing Premier League snob who thought there was no sentient life below 20th position would have assumed the thousands of yellow-and-green scarves were a vast anti-Glazer protest by the Norfolk branch of the Manchester United supporters' association.

But these noisy supporters are devoted followers of Lambert's football and Delia Smith's cooking. The TV chef has reportedly carved another slice off the club's debt by linking her new promotional deal with Waitrose with sponsorship of the Carrow Road catering. To avoid a crumble, make it rhubarb and ginger.

The upside of sudden falls is that they engender a cult-like defiance. After the first deadline, Norwich had sold 18,500 season tickets for next year. Their average gate of 24,630 is higher than in their Premier League season of 2004–05.

Big numbers abound in all these regeneration tales. Norwich, remember, plunged from the Premier League with a 6–0 defeat at Fulham and started in League One with a parodic 7–1 home defeat to Colchester, which had fans throwing season tickets at the bench and caused Delia and her crew to hire their tormentor, Lambert, who had devised the Colchester landslide.

The ardour of their fans has strengthened in adversity, even if groans and gasps accompany the smallest Norwich error. Grant Holt's 22 league goals ought to protect him from the kind of grandstand grumbling that greeted his small mistake in a passing triangle. This is not a recently invented passion. A list of the notables who have sported canary yellow in recent decades could start with Steve Bruce, Craig Bellamy, Dean Ashton, Dion Dublin and Darren Huckerby.

It was soon apparent that this was to be no polite round-table discussion on who deserves to win League One. As Leeds' Luciano Becchio stooped in the 11th minute to make a header, the boot of Michael Nelson caught him on the sweet spot of the jaw and a huddle of worried medical staff assembled for five minutes before Becchio was carted off.

Victims turned perpetrators. Richard Naylor hacked into Holt and Robert Snodgrass was fortunate to escape with a caution for taking Adam Drury out with his elbow. The sheer physicality and industry of Leeds was a restatement of the conviction they demonstrated in Cup ties against Liverpool, Manchester United and Spurs before their league form became more Crisp than Red Rum.

Simon Grayson, whose managerial glow has dimmed, was right to call Leeds the better of these two sides, but it was Lambert who won the strategic battle, sending on Stephen Hughes to surge down the right and bend a cross on to the head of another replacement, Martin, whose combined league tally with Holt is 37.

"The club has had a few barren years and what we've done is give the fans something back," Lambert said. Straight faces were just about maintained when he said they had given Norwich "just a chance" of taking one step back towards the Premier League.

In the Championship, a kind of Soviet parity endures. Most teams look more or less equal and it takes a clever manager to engineer an escape. Lambert, a Champions League-winning player with Borussia Dortmund who remembers the "graveyard" feel of Colchester's 7–1 win here in August, would be the club's best asset in a year when they would need new funds to toss on the investment bonfire. If Celtic come for him, they may need that money to build a roadblock between Norwich and Glasgow.