I often wondered how I would react when we won the league again. Whether I would scream until my throat gave out, whether I would jump around in joy, who I would call first. I have carried that question for over two decades.

I grew up in North-East India, where football was the only game that mattered. We played barefoot until the sun went down and then we played some more. European football did not exist for us then. I knew the global giants of the game only through stories my father told me: a goalkeeper called Peter Shilton, a man called Diego Maradona. Italia 90 was my first World Cup. I pinned centre spreads from Sportstar magazine to my bedroom wall: Gullit, Rijkaard, Van Basten. I fell in love with the Dutch national team without having a club to attach that love to. Those days, European club football reached us only in fragments, usually just the finals. I could admire the players, but I could not follow a team every week. There was no way to belong to a club.

Then I watched Dennis Bergkamp. The touch, the control, the way he saw a pass before it existed. Euro 96, the 1998 World Cup, and there he was each time, doing things with a football that no one else seemed capable of imagining. He played for Arsenal, and I found my club. I was extremely fortunate to have found us when I did, because what followed was the most extraordinary period of football I have witnessed. Anelka, Adams, Henry, Pires, Campbell, Ljungberg. Arsene Wenger was ridiculed when he said we could go an entire season unbeaten. A year later, on 25 April 2004, Patrick Vieira scored at White Hart Lane, Robert Pires added a second, and we clinched the title at the home of our fiercest rivals. I was 23 years old. I genuinely believed it was just the beginning.

It was the end. What followed was a slow and painful decline: the Champions League final heartbreak at the Stade de France in 2006, the selling of our best players one by one, the annual ritual of qualifying for the Champions League and pretending that counted for something. Our standards eroded so completely that finishing fourth, once a source of frustration, became an aspiration. Rival fans and the media spent a decade turning us into a punchline. We won a few FA Cups, and each one felt like a sedative, enough to dull the pain of knowing that the league title, the one that actually defines a club's standing in English football, was drifting further away with every passing season. I started to wonder whether we would ever win it again.

December 2019, fifteen years since the last title, Mikel Arteta came back to the club as manager. We were in eighth place. He asked for trust, trust in the process, and the word "process" became its own punchline for a while. The discipline returned. There were talks of non-negotiables. The years and years of built-up toxicity around the club began to fade and we could finally see the faint rays of light at the end of a long and painful tunnel. In 2022-23, we led the table for months before City hunted us down. In 2023-24, we led again, City overtook us again, this time by two points. In 2024-25, Liverpool took the title, and we finished second for a third consecutive season. No club in Premier League history had finished as runners-up three years running before we did it, and the external verdict after each of those seasons was identical: Arsenal lack the winning mentality. Arsenal are nearly men. Arsenal can get close to the summit, and the altitude will always get them.

The pundits who had never managed a football match in their lives explained with absolute confidence that Arteta did not have the capacity to take the final step. Three years of a squad improving season on season, three years of evidence that the gap was closing, and the conclusion from the outside was that the ceiling was permanent. Set Piece FC, they called us, as though scoring from dead-ball situations is somehow illegitimate, as though every goal from a corner is worth less than a goal from open play, as though the routines we executed with precision week after week were accidental rather than the product of elite coaching, elite delivery from Rice, and elite execution from Gabriel, Havertz, Saliba, and every player who attacked those set pieces with intent. Every title-winning team in the history of English football has been defined by something. Wenger's Invincibles were defined by pace and flair. Mourinho's Chelsea were defined by defensive structure. Guardiola's City were defined by possession and control. The trophy count for each of those approaches is exactly the same: one. Arteta's Arsenal are defined by defensive solidity and set-piece dominance, and the response to anyone who spent three years calling that insufficient is now sitting in a trophy cabinet at the Emirates.

This season, we led the table for 200 days. City overtook us on goal difference in late April after we lost at the Etihad, dropped points against Bournemouth, and saw the lead evaporate in 11 days. The script the outside world had been writing for three years was ready to print: Arsenal have bottled it again. Declan Rice, on the pitch at the Etihad with the cameras rolling, told Martin Odegaard that it was not done. Guardiola, when shown the footage, said he loved it, that it showed what Rice meant to us. What happened next showed what the entire squad meant to each other. Four consecutive wins. Four consecutive clean sheets. Newcastle, Fulham, West Ham, Burnley. The title race rebuilt from a position that every neutral and most pundits had already conceded to City. We conceded 26 goals in 37 league matches, the fewest in the division. David Raya kept 19 clean sheets and won the Golden Glove for the third consecutive season. We scored 17 goals from corners, a new Premier League record. We won 25 of our 37 matches. The numbers do not lie, and the numbers say that the best defensive team in the country, the most effective set-piece team in Premier League history, and the squad that refused to accept the nearly-men label are now the champions of England.

Last night, at around half past two in the morning, Bournemouth and Manchester City drew 1-1 at the Vitality Stadium. Eli Junior Kroupi scored in the 39th minute. Erling Haaland equalised in stoppage time. It was not enough. City finished four points behind us with one match to play each, and the arithmetic confirmed what 37 matches of evidence had already established: Arsenal are Premier League champions for the first time in 22 years. Our 14th league title. Our fourth in the Premier League era. The longest wait between titles in the club's history, and it is over.

The house was silent. I did not scream or shout. I did not jump in joy. I wanted to, but my wife and child were fast asleep and there was no way I was going to wake them up. It took over an hour for the reality of it to settle. At around four in the morning, a 45-year-old man sat alone in a dark room, and cried. That is the answer to the question I have been asking myself since I was 23 years old, and it was nothing like what I had imagined. It was quieter, and it was heavier, and it meant more than I had the capacity to express to anyone who was not awake to hear it.

Twenty-two years of belief. Trust what you are building and the results will come. Arteta asked us to trust the process, and the process delivered a Premier League title. Rice said it was not done, and then he made sure it was done. Saka signed a new contract in February because he believed in where this club was going. Gyokeres scored 14 league goals in his first season because Arteta and Berta built a squad with genuine depth for the first time in a generation. Raya kept 19 clean sheets because the defensive structure Arteta installed is the best this club has produced since the back four of Adams, Dixon, Winterburn and Bould. Every individual contribution served a collective purpose, and the collective purpose was to end the longest wait in the club's modern history. It has been ended.

I love you, Arsenal. We are the champions.