Leicester City are the Premier League champions

Mistakes happen, but you’ve got to admit: This is pretty funny.

Leicester City Football Club are champions of England. Yes. They have done the impossible. That, too. The odds were 5,000-to-1 against them. After battling relegation last year and finishing 14th, no sane person expected or had any reason to expect a turnaround like this. It’s an incredible feat. Yes, yes, we know that and we’ll deal with that later, but it’s time to pay respects to one of the most pivotal characters in this story.

Eden Hazard is a hero and must be worshiped as such.

On December 19, Leicester -- still only 18 months after promotion -- took down Everton at Goodison Park by a 3-2 margin. Riyad Mahrez scored twice, and Shinji Okazaki put the match away with a goal in the 69th minute.

This was Leicester’s eighth league win in 11 matches (the other three all draws). The Foxes hadn’t lost since getting rocked by Arsenal on September 26. This was the moment people began to switch from “They’re a nice story” to “Wait, are they for real?”

A Leicester City fan is £20,600 (which is nearly $30,000 USD) richer after his team won the Premier League title on Monday. Leigh Herbert reportedly bet £5 back in August, while he went out drinking on holiday. It was around this time that Leicester City were given 5000-to-1 odds on winning the Premier League.

Before Herbert came away a huge winner, he’d made headlines back in February for the same bet, when people noticed that he had the potential to win that much money. Per ITV, William Hill, the bookmaker that he placed a bet with, had offered him £3,200 to cash out instead of going all the way. Herbert refused, of course; he even went out of his way to rib them over Twitter:

There’s a postman in Leicester who looks like Jamie Vardy, and he showed up to celebrate his club’s Premier League title victory. And he got the thrill of his life on Monday when the team bus picked him up and let him celebrate with the players.

“I’ve not slept. I went in for work at 6.30 a.m. and ran my round so I could be here outside the stadium,” said Vardy lookalike Lee Chapman. “I’m still supposed to be at work now.” Chapman doesn’t just have a face like Vardy’s -- he’s the same height and age too.

It happened. It really happened. Leicester City is the Premier League champion!

Eden Hazard’s stunner that handed Leicester the title. (r/soccer)

Leicester City are the champions of England. That sentence would be moderately silly even if it weren’t true; that it is, is completely nonsensical. Perhaps even more nonsensical is that this hasn’t been a fluke, or the eventual consequence of a massive scandal. They’ve been the best team over the 36 games that have mattered this season; they’ve taken the Premier League, sized it up and won the thing.

Winning the league is a monstrously tricky business. As this season began, only 23 teams had ever finished a season as title winners — that’s since Preston North End won the first, way back in 1888-89 — and only five had won the Premier League since the Premier League became a thing. And until yesterday, English football hadn’t had a first-time title winner since Nottingham Forest in 1978. (Some other leagues, for comparison: Dundee United, Scotland, 1983; Sampdoria, Italy, 1991; Deportivo la Coruna, Spain, 2000; Wolfsburg, Germany, 2009.)

That’s a wonderful feeling captured for all eternity -- and shared by the man making the call for NBC Sports, Arlo White. A longtime Leicester fan himself, you can just hear the professionalism start to crack and the long-held love for his club leaking through as he announced that the Foxes had won the Premier League title.

This title has been a long time waiting for Leicester City -- it’s the club’s first top-division title in its 132-year history. They’ve won lower divisions at times in the past, but now they’ve won the top prize in England just two years after earning promotion back to the Premier League. Now it’s time to celebrate.

Rarely in sports does a team get to sit and watch themselves win the championship, but that’s exactly what Leicester City got to do today.

As time expired in Chelsea’s draw with Tottenham the Foxes saw themselves become champions of England, and they went nuts.