The Tyne will continue flowing east. Rain will arrive precisely three minutes after leaving the house without a coat. Somewhere in the city centre, somebody will be explaining how things were better in the Entertainers era. And Sunderland, for the foreseeable future, will remain a safe distance away from the Premier League.
For years, these assumptions provided a degree of comfort. Sunderland existed largely as a memory, a rival preserved in archive footage and fading derby highlights. They were discussed nostalgically, occasionally sympathetically, but rarely seriously. The Premier League moved on without them, and if we're being honest, so did most people.
Then they came back.
At first, their return felt more romantic than threatening. English football enjoys these stories. A sleeping giant awakens. A proud club rediscovers itself. Supporters return in their thousands. Broadcasters commission montages. Former players appear on television wearing expressions usually reserved for military reunions.
The script is familiar because it almost never lasts.
Eventually reality arrives. The quality gap reveals itself. Enthusiasm meets economics. Hope encounters Erling Haaland.
That was supposed to be Sunderland's experience.
Indeed, many of us were counting on it.
Yet as the season unfolded, something rather awkward happened. Sunderland refused to behave like a newly promoted side. They showed none of the frantic uncertainty that typically characterises clubs reacquainting themselves with the top flight. There was no sense of survival at all costs. No atmosphere of impending doom. No weekly exercise in damage limitation disguised as tactical flexibility.
Instead there was composure.
The longer the season progressed, the more difficult that composure became to dismiss. Their performances possessed an irritating coherence. Players seemed to understand their roles. Recruitment appeared to have been undertaken by adults. Results were accumulated not through fortune or chaos, but through competence.
As footballing developments go, it was profoundly unreasonable.
Rival supporters are prepared for success. We understand how to process wealth, star players and the occasional fortunate season. What proves harder to accept is sensible progress. There is no obvious flaw to point at. No easy explanation. No comforting narrative that allows one to conclude it will all unravel shortly.
Sunderland simply looked well run.
Writing those words feels faintly unnatural.
For much of the modern era, Sunderland and stability have occupied neighbouring postcodes but rarely the same address. Yet this version of the club appeared to know precisely what it wanted to become. There was patience in their planning, confidence in their recruitment and an unmistakable sense that decisions were being made with next season in mind rather than next Saturday.
The effect was cumulative.
By autumn, isolated results had become a pattern. By Christmas, that pattern had become evidence. By spring, even the most stubborn observers were running out of alternative explanations.
The uncomfortable truth was impossible to avoid.
Sunderland belonged here.
Not as guests. Not as tourists. Not as one of those charming football stories destined to end in relegation and applause. They belonged because they looked entirely at ease in their surroundings. The Premier League did not appear to overwhelm them. If anything, they seemed determined to treat it as their natural habitat.
What made the whole affair particularly frustrating was the youthfulness of it all.
Promoted sides are supposed to rely on experience. They are supposed to survive through organisation, discipline and the accumulated cynicism of players who have seen every conceivable footballing disaster before. Sunderland instead placed their faith in youth and energy. Their best players often appeared too young to remember the club's last sustained period in the division. Rather than being intimidated by the occasion, they seemed invigorated by it.
The confidence was infectious.
One sensed it in the stands. The Stadium of Light has always possessed an ability to amplify emotion, whether joy or despair, and for the first time in years the dominant emotion appeared to be anticipation. Not hope. Hope is cautious. Hope asks permission.
This was belief.
Belief is a far more dangerous thing.
Belief alters expectations. It changes the questions supporters ask. Conversations cease to revolve around survival and begin to concern possibility. The future stops being something feared and becomes something awaited.
For a rival supporter, it was a deeply unpleasant development.
Yet football's enduring problem is that reality tends not to care about tribal loyalties. Eventually evidence accumulates. Eventually performances matter. Eventually even the most reluctant observer must acknowledge what is directly in front of them.
And what stood in front of us by the season's conclusion was a Sunderland side that had not merely returned to the Premier League, but re-established itself within it.
There is, admittedly, something infuriating about that.
For years Sunderland occupied a peculiar space within English football: too large to ignore, too absent to matter. Their return has corrected that imbalance. The club feels relevant again. The city feels connected to the wider football conversation again. The rivalry, perhaps the most significant consequence of all, feels meaningful again.
North-East football has always been at its most compelling when both sides possess something worth defending. Rivalries require proximity. They require tension. They require the possibility of humiliation.
Above all, they require two clubs operating on the same stage.
Which brings us to the most aggravating conclusion of all.
Sunderland's return has been good for football.
I dislike writing that sentence almost as much as you enjoy reading it.
But some truths, however inconvenient, remain impossible to deny.
Sunderland came back expecting a challenge. Instead, they reminded everyone why they belonged in the first place.
And while every Newcastle supporter reserves the right to spend next season hoping they lose every available fixture, there is no escaping the reality that their return has made the game richer, louder and considerably more interesting.
It is, in every possible sense, deeply inconvenient.