So, farewell Mr Cock-Up and hello Mr Wenger. This is still my beloved Norwich, but not as I’ve come to know it…

I went to a wedding at the weekend (no, not that one) and met up with some people I hadn’t seen for ages.

Two things were said to me more than once:

1) ‘You haven’t changed a bit….’

2) ‘Are Norwich going to do it, then?’

I took the first as a compliment, though with a slightly different intonation it could easily have been a criticism.

My answer to the second was that if we were going to go up, it wouldn’t be in a simple and straightforward way. That’s not how City generally do things.

(Clinching promotion in 1982 by losing at Sheffield Wednesday being a case in point. Relying on Arsenal to win the FA Cup in 1993 to gain our place in Europe being another.)

But how wrong I was. A day later, we were in the Premier League. The chance was there and bang… we took it.

Call me slow if you like (there’s a comments box below), but it’s only just hit me that the essence of the City team has changed. And that’s definitely a compliment, not a criticism.

The more hard-nosed, business-like approach in the boardroom is now reflected on the pitch.

Normally such an attitude means a joyless, but effective brand of ‘percentage football’, but not in this case – and perhaps it’s the fact that the winning mentality has been combined with attractive passing football in the best City tradition that has caused the penny to drop so late.

It could be my innate pessimism, but I’ve usually felt over the years that there’s been a fragile streak in Norwich teams. Martin O’Neill once alluded to it during his brief spell in charge.

When interviewed just after we’d won a televised match, he was asked whether he’d felt comfortable as the game headed to its conclusion.

His reply was something like: ‘I wouldn’t trust this lot to hold out for a win if we were four up with five minutes left…’

This season at Barnsley, when we were two up and in complete control, my daughter turned to me and said: ‘We’ve won this, haven’t we Dad?’

I crossly recounted the story of how we’d once been 2-0 up at Crewe with eight minutes left and still contrived to lose 3-2. But as I now have to accept my daughter understood earlier than me, things are different now.

We don’t seem to wobble any more. We used to lose points to last-gasp goals.

Now we’re the ones scoring them. (Millwall away being the rare exception this season.)

We used to sit back and invite trouble after scoring. Not any more. We used to be rubbish on the telly. Now we’re not.

We used to go out of the cup competitions early… OK, so we haven’t cracked that one yet, but even losing to Leyton Orient is now looking like a tactical masterstroke.

The point I’m trying to make is that, to borrow a phrase from Baldrick in Blackadder, we are no longer at home to Mr Cock-Up. The players appear to be absolutely nerveless; the calmness with which they coped with the pressure and atmosphere at Portman Road demonstrated that the play-offs wouldn’t have proved a problem if we’d ended up in them.

It’s a remarkable change for Lambert and his management team to have engineered, and so quickly.

But there has been another transformation which is arguably even more impressive.

A year ago, I wrote in this column: “Paul Lambert will have a tricky task in making changes to the squad for the Championship without losing that spirit and belief.

“We saw in the 2004/05 Premiership season how quickly the magic can be lost when you get the adjustments wrong. The likes of Jonson, Helveg, Charlton and Bentley were brought in, while players like McVeigh, Roberts and Mackay who had done so much to get us promoted were sidelined or discarded.”

It’s clear now that the tricky task has been brilliantly handled.

So brilliantly, in fact, that it feels as though the current side is largely the same one that got us promoted last year – even though it’s been rebuilt to the extent that only three of the team that started on Monday evening were regulars last season.

This season’s signings, both permanent and temporary, all fitted in seamlessly.

And the team spirit and sense of momentum are so strong that some players seem to feel that they were here last season when they weren’t; Andrew Surman, interviewed in the Fratton Park dressing room after the game, referred to what ‘we’ achieved in League One.

That big, collective spirit is further enhanced by Lambert’s frequent references to the contribution made by players no longer at the club.

I can’t think of another manager who, at the moment of success, has had the thoughtfulness and generosity to pay tribute to departed individuals who have played their part.

Now, of course, he needs to oversee another reshaping of the squad – perhaps an even trickier task than this season, but I think we all have faith in his ability to do it. His decision-making this year has been almost flawless.

I feel that I should end the final column of this season with some sort of summary or appreciation of what has been achieved. But how to find the words to describe it?

The box of superlatives has been emptied since Monday and still nothing’s done it justice.

We know what we’ve been through and what we’ve come back from. Not just losing 7-1 to Colchester, or watching that ragbag of rubbish disintegrate at The Valley two years ago, but the steady decline of the club in the seasons before that.

Such a descent and meteoric resurgence is something that few fans will ever experience; no Arsenal or Manchester United supporter will know what it feels like.

I’m not going to call it a journey, for fear of sounding like an X Factor contestant. But Alton Towers doesn’t have rides like this. ____________________________________

 And finally… Quote of the Week, courtesy of my wife. “Are you still going on Saturday even though you’re already up?”

Umm, let me think…