Manchester United fans have had plenty of things to complain about in recent years but, at a club with a cavalier spirit at heart, nothing has quite crushed the soul like the joyless, pedestrian, monotone football that had become a fixture under consecutive managers.

Sir Alex Ferguson worked to four central pillars – pace, power, penetration and unpredictability. But, unless you count the speed with which his successors David Moyes, Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho were ushered towards the exit door, speed – of thought, movement and execution – has been in woefully short supply at Old Trafford for far too long.

In that respect, Sunday’s 4-0 victory over Chelsea represented a sort of escapism, a throwback to happier times when the word “risk” was not treated with inherent suspicion and the players actually looked like they believed in what they were being asked to do. After multiple seasons of slow, static, one-paced football, United suddenly had a surfeit of players with pace to burn and the semblance of a framework in which to properly showcase it.

No one, of course, should be getting carried away. Just as a bright 90 minutes does not guarantee a corner has been turned, so United’s flaws are not going to be ironed out over the course of one afternoon and Chelsea, remember, asked plenty of questions in the first half. Indeed, any United fan already getting drunk with giddiness might want to bear in mind that bogey side Wolverhampton Wanderers are up next at Molineux, where they lost twice last season, and are unlikely to leave the sort of wide open spaces to exploit that a naive Chelsea did.