Those who were caught up in the story feel the same. Gary Lineker, the stripped-to-his-boxers television personality in question, supports Leicester and played for it, but even he believes the club has simply reverted to type. “It’s not that anything in particular has gone wrong this season,” he said. “It’s just that this is what Leicester is, what it has always been.”

The contrast between what Leicester is and what Leicester, briefly, was has simply served to deepen the sense of disbelief, to allow the doubts to flourish. It is hard to be sure that it did, actually, happen. “I think I remember it,” Lineker said.

Only firm proof assuages the doubt. There is the club’s continuing Champions League campaign, of course, the great beacon of optimism from the first half of Leicester’s season. Ranieri set his team a target of remaining in European competition beyond Christmas, and his players delivered in style: Sevilla awaits in the Round of 16.

There are the books, too, with titles like “Fearless” and “5000-1” and the slew of others that were published to record what Lineker called the “most unlikely sporting triumph of all time.” And there are the awards, which continue to trickle in. Before Christmas, Leicester was named team of the year in the BBC’s year-end awards, while Ranieri picked up the honor as best coach. Just this week, Riyad Mahrez was named African player of the year, a title Shinji Okazaki had already picked up in Asia.

It is the mementos in Leicester, though, the ones available to all, that will endure the longest. W Archer & Son, the butcher that in March created a sausage in honor of Ranieri, is only a 10-minute drive from Leicester City’s King Power Stadium. The sausage contained chili, garlic, fennel and “a hint of Champions League.”

The sausages are still for sale, though they are not moving in quite the quantities they did in the season’s final weeks, when the owner, Sean Jeynes, was selling as many as 600 a week.