Tottenham Hotspur vs. Arsenal: St. Totteringham is dead. Long live St. Totteringham.

And so it came to pass that as the end times approached, various signs and portents appeared to frighten the populace. Birds were seen to fly backwards. Horses devoured one another in the stables. And St. Totteringham’s Day was cancelled.

St. Totteringham, for those of you that haven’t read your Golden Legend, was a former Arsenal goalkeeper. He was martyred in the process of humiliating Tottenham: having saved what would have been a match-winning penalty, he rolled the ball out to himself, dribbled past Spurs’ entire team, reached the opposition’s goal line and stopped the ball. Then, as he dropped to his hands and knees and nodded the ball over the line, the goalposts collapsed on his head. Unlike the posts, the goal stood, and Arsenal won the game.

None of that is true, obviously. But St. Totteringham’s day is, in spirit, a ritual humiliation, celebrated by Arsenal fans whenever their club are mathematically certain to finish above Tottenham Hotspur in the league. For the last 20-odd years it has arrived at some point in the season: Sometimes embarrassingly early; other times coming down to the final day. But it’s always arrived.

This season, thanks to Spurs’ 2-0 win over Arsenal at the weekend, it won’t be coming.

St. Totteringham’s Day is a recent confection. It was invented just after the turn of the millennium on an Arsenal discussion board, at a time when Arsenal were probably the best team in the country. It has since bloomed into a persistent thing thanks in part to the gaping, ever-hungry maw of social media, which must be fed banter at all times. But also, of course, thanks to Spurs’ relentless habit of always finishing below Arsenal.

Sporting rivalries always look a little peculiar to anybody on the outside. The jokes don’t make sense without the feeling. St. Totteringham’s Day, if you don’t care about either team, might look petty and small. And in recent years, as Arsenal have drifted away from the pinnacle of English football, it might even seem a little embarrassing. Stick St. Totts’ on the mantelpiece, next to the fourth-place trophy. Well done you.

Yet it kind of works. After all, to be a Spurs fan is to subject oneself to a grind that often promises hope, yet always ends in disappointment, often in farce, and that offers only moral victories. And those at a stretch. To be an Arsenal fan, meanwhile, is to take comfort in one’s own superiority, to know that whatever else happens, however bad things get, the other lot will be having a worse time of it. So of course a day appeared to mark the confirmation. How could it not?

And as for its cancellation, due respect needs to be paid to both Mauricio Pochettino’s excellent football team and also the fixture computer. The latter made sure that this momentous day in the history of banter and counter-banter came not after some 1-1 draw away at West Brom but at White Hart Lane, in the last north London derby that the ground will host.

The former, meanwhile, took Arsenal to pieces. The scoreline may not have got out of control but this was a hammering in every other respect. As individuals, Spurs’ players overcame most of their direct opponents, but as a team, they left Arsenal miles behind. They turned up with a shape and a plan, they threw their hearts and their lungs and their brains into it, and they got their reward. This wasn’t just a victory, it was a clear statement of identity.

Sunday’s match was the culmination of a decade’s worth of slow, incremental progress for Spurs and an even slower decline for Arsenal. Tottenham’s glory is not permanent, though — we’re just a Real Madrid tapping up of Dele Alli and an Arsène Wenger resignation away from restoration of the old order looking likely.

St. Totteringham’s Day will be back. Banter never dies, it only sleeps, and Arsenal will presumably get good again at some point. Whether its banterous power has survived such a comprehensive dismissal remains to be seen. But for the moment, the calendar is free, and we’re in uncharted territory. Of the two teams on the White Hart Lane pitch this weekend, Tottenham made the most sense by far. That might be even weirder than a backwards-flying bird.