That was the season when his Arsenal team remained unbeaten in all of their 38 league games en route to the Premiership title.

In so doing they emulated the achievement of Preston North End in season 1888-1889, when the men from Deepdale won the League and FA Cup without defeat - and the latter without conceding a goal.

Inevitably it was Manchester United who went and ruined it all for Arsenal the following season when they prevented them extending their unbeaten run to a half-century.

Once you get onto an unbeaten sporting run, you’re like a gunslinger, your name preceding you, always on the lookout for that cold-eyed shadower who’s even faster on the draw. He’s out there waiting for you…

Back then, the men behind the gunsmoke were Ruud van Nistelrooy and Wayne Rooney, scorers of the United goals that turned  Arsenal back into Vincibles. Gunners outgunned.

You have to think, once the unbeaten run goes, that there is consolation in playing in a team sport. You’ve lost, at last. But you are not alone in that.

How much more pressure must there be on sportsmen and women who create similarly victorious sequences in individual sports?

I was pondering this earlier in the week while on a bus from Rome’s Fiumicino airport to the meeting hotel for today’s International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) Diamond League meeting in the Olympic Stadium - in company with the Russian high jumper Mariya Lasitskene.

The Authorised Neutral Athlete - to give her her official title while Russia remains non grata on doping grounds - has a reputation for being unsmiling. She certainly didn’t smile much when she stood on top of the podium at last year’s IAAF World Championships in London, and at the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Birmingham two months ago - but then she was listening to the IAAF rather than the Russian anthem.

She was smiling readily enough on her bus journey, however, as she chatted to her two Russian companions, at one point figuring out how to open a particularly mysterious strap on a newly-bought watch for one of them. All told she looked remarkably relaxed considering she was heading for the big 4-0 at the Golden Gala Pietro Mennea meeting – that is, a 40th consecutive victory.

The Lasitskene run goes all the way back to July 1 in 2016. She might already have reached 40 had Russia not been suspended from participation in the athletics at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Now she will seek to earn that landmark win in another Olympic stadium.

Already, however, she has surpassed one of the most recent marvels of enduring invulnerability in track and field - the 34 consecutive wins put together over four years by Colombian triple jumper Caterine Ibarguen.

The eyes behind the gunsmoke eventually belonged to Kazakhstan’s Olga Rypakova, who defeated her at the Birmingham IAAF Diamond League meeting in June 2016, having been the last athlete to have beaten her four years earlier - in the London 2012 Olympic final. The reverse did not prove traumatic for Ibarguen. Indeed, it may even have been something of a relief. Whatever the case, she went on to win that year’s Olympic gold medal. 

There are three notable winning runs in men’s athletics events. Mike Powell’s world long jump record of 8.95 metres, produced on a night of high drama at the 1991 IAAF World Championships in Tokyo, ended a sequence of 65 consecutive wins for his United States compatriot Carl Lewis.

In terms of long distance running, the Czech legend Emil Zatopek created a run of 75 competitions unbeaten which stretched from a 10,000 metres race in Bucharest on September 26 in 1948 to July 11 in 1951, when he finished second in a 3,000m race in Prague.

But the gold medal for unbeaten sequences in men’s track and field goes to US 400m hurdler Ed Moses, who put together 122 consecutive wins between September 2 in 1977, when he won in Düsseldorf, and June 4 in 1987, when he was beaten in Madrid by compatriot Danny Harris. During this time, despite the US boycott of Moscow 1980, Moses won Olympic gold and twice improved his own world record.

Arguably, Moses deserves an overall gold for unbeatability, given that he almost made it through a complete decade. Even Pakistan’s squash player Jahangir Khan, whose 555 consecutive wins is cited as the longest recorded winning streak in any professional sport, only kept that up from 1981 to 1986.

Meanwhile, if Lasitskene is seeking to become the owner of the longest winning run by any elite female track and field athlete, she has a way to go. The Guinness Book of Records has twice cited Romania’s high jumper Iolanda Balas, the 1960 and 1964 Olympic champion, as having won 140 - and then 150 - consecutive events. She herself mentioned a 142-competition run.

Whatever the exact number, Lasitskene can’t afford to relax for a few years yet…