Fulham's footballing roadshow trundled across town to its latest stopping point, put on the usual slick exhibition and then packed up and headed for home with the feeling of a job well done.
Thankfully for the rest of the First Division, the bandwagon will roll out of sight before next season, ending the envious glances and freeing up a promotion spot for the bottle neck of big boys trying to reach the big time.
In the end-of-season reckoning, the day the Cottagers stormed the Palace will scarcely be remembered by anyone other than Luis Boa Morte, who now starts a three-match ban for spitting in the face of Bolton's Robbie Elliott.
He spat in the face of his critics on Saturday, by twice rolling the ball past the Crystal Palace goalkeeper Aleksandrs Kolinko, after neat passes from John Collins and Steve Finnan, to garner three more points.
The Fulham midfielder Lee Clark swatted away the weekly question about complacency and proved that his claim - "we've just got to keep focused" - was not empty rhetoric by revealing the team would be spending the week off, because of the upcoming internationals, in the company of Marseille, Milan and Benfica at a friendly tournament in France.
Jean Tigana intends to hit the Premiership ground running, and his £4m defensive recruit Alain Goma, snapped up from Newcastle ahead of the transfer deadline but not named for this match, will play his part. "The manager just wanted to leave time for him to bed in," explained Clark.
Such schemes are luxuries for the Palace manager Alan Smith, who rushed in his £1.5m signing from Bradford, David Hopkin, for his second spell at the club, but though Palace pressed in the second half, there was a lack of conviction up front, until Simon Rodger hit the post in the last minute. It meant for the second time this season that Palace had lost six games in a row and are just two points above the drop zone.
It was Smith who jumped off Fulham's bandwagon last summer, leaving his job as academy director to replace Steve Coppell in the Palace hotseat. "I know what every Fulham player earns and the difference [between them and us] is ginormous," he said, conceding that this battle was never really part of the war against relegation. "John Collins and Lee Clark should not be playing in Division One and I think Sean Davis will play for England one day."
Charlton won the title with 91 points last year; Fulham already have 85 with nine games left. But there is no finishing tape in sight - this is only just the warm-up.
Source The Guardian by Matthew Hancock