Tottenham's road to the Champions League final has been five years in the making under Mauricio Pochettino and that lesson of continuity is one worth learning, writes Adam Bate.
If Tottenham do not win the Champions League final against Liverpool in Madrid this Saturday, they already know how that defeat will be framed. If only they had signed someone. Just one transfer might have been all that were needed to get them over the line.
All teams must buy eventually, of course, and Mauricio Pochettino will want to add to the squad in the summer. But it is all too easy to overlook the advantage of continuity in this Spurs success story. It is the great intangible but it feels like it's a lesson worth learning.
This is not a small squad. Tottenham actually had more different starters in the Premier League this season than any of their top-six rivals. No manager in the competition made more changes to his starting line-up than Pochettino during the Premier League campaign.
But continuity has still been a crucial aspect because of the length of time this group of players have been together, growing and improving, adding to their collective understanding. Look a little deeper into the numbers and a very different picture emerges.
London rivals Arsenal and Chelsea each had no fewer than 18 players start Premier League games for them in the two seasons prior to this one who did not start a game for them this time around. That reflects the churn of players that has been witnessed elsewhere.
In contrast, there was not a single player who started a game for Spurs last season who didn't also start a game for them this season. In the season prior to that, there were just three other names - Kyle Walker, who was sold to Manchester City, Kevin Wimmer and Vincent Janssen. Even Janssen has been back involved from the bench recently.
It is an illustration of just how little has changed in terms of personnel at Tottenham and this really does matter because it's there in all that they do. Attacking movements take time to learn and develop. So does defensive understanding. Spurs forged those bonds years ago.
Harry Kane's first ever Premier League goal? It came in a 5-1 win over Sunderland back in 2014 and the man who swung in the cross was Christian Eriksen. Dele Alli's first Premier League goal came the following year at Leicester. It was Kane who started the move.
Heung-Min Son's first Premier League goal came from a counter-attack begun by Erik Lamela with Eriksen providing the assist. These are more than mere quirks, they help to explain why Tottenham can be so tough to play against. They all know each other's game.
When Alli equalised against Fulham in January, many might have felt that they had seen the goal before - and with good reason. It came from an Eriksen cross and was reminiscent of two goals that the Dane had laid on for him against Chelsea more than two years earlier.
It is over a decade ago now that Jan Vertonghen and Toby Alderweireld first played together in the Ajax first-team. Even Serge Aurier and Lucas Moura were paired together on the right flank for Paris Saint-Germain as long ago as 2014. Everywhere there are partnerships.
It has happened by design. Having signed others from Ajax, there was confidence that Davinson Sanchez would also adapt quickly. Spurs refused to loan out Harry Winks because of Pochettino's concern that "it would be a completely different philosophy". Both have ensured that the team has continued to evolve even without major changes.
Remarkably, on the occasion of Moussa Sissoko's 100th appearance for the club in an emphatic 6-2 win away to Everton over the Christmas period, nine of the other ten starters that day had actually been at the club longer than the France international midfielder.
It is an illustration of just how much continuity there has been and Sissoko, in particular, personifies the advantage of giving players time to impress. It is easy to imagine how he might have been discarded - unloved by supporters - under other regimes. Instead, he has been afforded the opportunity to completely turn his career at the club around.
"I am feeling stronger," Sissoko said recently when asked about his significant upsurge in form. "I feel I have become a better player. When you play nearly every week, you have more confidence, better fitness and you have more roles in the team. It becomes easier."
This is the key point. It becomes easier. It has become football's forgotten rule. "If you buy a lot of players everyone needs to know what is going on straight away and be a bit lucky," Eriksen once noted. If you keep the group together then it's not luck, it's good planning.
Lucas Moura, the only new signing made in the past three transfer windows, is completing his second season and was seen as an unlikely hat-trick hero in that sensational win in Amsterdam. But his conversion into a support striker had been a long time coming. "I started learning to play in that position from the moment I arrived," he explained.
Fernando Llorente has confounded expectations by proving to be an effective weapon in the absence of Kane. "If I am happy and determined every day, if I am enjoying every training session even when I am not playing, it's because of the great job he does managing and planning everything," he said of Pochettino recently. "We have a very good relationship."
The coach deserves huge credit. Of course he does. As well as his man-management skills, he has been tactically astute and done good business in the transfer market when given the chance. But his success at Spurs has also seen him, largely due to financial necessity, tap into an idea that had been lost to the modern game - that continuity is a virtue too.
This is an era in which even the club that signs four new players is said to have had a quiet summer if the acquisitions were made early in the window. It is an industry in which clubs constantly search for the one signing that will change it all, even if the last big-money buy is still settling into his new surroundings. For all the money, time seems one luxury too many.
It is flawed thinking and Pochettino's project reminds us why. In 1961, when Tottenham became the first team in the 20th century to do the league and cup double in English football, there was not a single player in that fabled first-choice line-up who had not been at the club the previous season too. The value of continuity was well understood back then.
This Spurs side appreciate it too as they attempt to emulate their predecessors and write their own names into legend by winning the biggest game in the club's 137-year history. And if the key moment comes from a Heung-Min Son counter-attack or a Christian Eriksen cross to the head of Dele Alli, just know that it's a triumph that's been years in the making