As Manchester City showed in patches against Real Madrid on Tuesday night, there is life in the old dog yet, but there can be no doubt that this great team is coming to an end.
City know this. They spent nearly £200million on four first-team players in the winter transfer window and intend to make further acquisitions in the summer, while saying goodbye to some of the fundamental parts of a team that has taken English football to new heights.
The problem is that there are more than three months to go until the end of the season and there will be many more times when their current limitations will be exposed by teams with quality and energy -- and there are plenty of those around.
City as a football team are not finished by any means. They have enough quality to secure qualification for next season's Champions League via the Premier League, especially as fifth place could well be enough to get there.
They might even suckerpunch Madrid at the Bernabeu next Wednesday because they have Erling Haaland and football is unpredictable.
But this current group cannot get back to the level of the team that won four Premier League titles in a row, six out of the last seven, amassed 100 points, won a domestic treble and a 'proper' one as well.
It has not taken a defeat against Madrid to see this. City have been struggling for nearly four months now and there is still no end in sight.
It seemed obvious on Tuesday that they were playing to their full capacity -- putting in all the effort they had, executing the gameplan as they needed to -- but that it was still not enough.
The issues that set them down this road in November are no less evident now. They have a lack of mobility and physicality in midfield -- look at how Jude Bellingham powered through in the final minutes.
Their defenders have been on a sushi carousel of injuries, with one or two coming back from a lay-off only to see the others drop out immediately and oblige them to play until they drop. If you think 'sushi carousel' is a weird analogy, Ruben Dias called it a "death sequence".
Dias only returned to the line-up on Saturday, Nathan Ake only came back last night. John Stones has been eased back from injury after two other aborted attempts since November, but after playing an hour in midfield against Madrid he faded in the final 30 after dropping back into defence.
They concede goals in bunches -- Madrid, Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain and Brentford have scored two in quick succession in the last month alone -- and often those come from mistakes.
Ederson gifted Madrid their second goal with an errant pass and he hardly helped a poor situation when Mateo Kovacic and Rico Lewis were careless to gift the third.
"Many games it happened," Guardiola said of mistakes and poor decision making on Tuesday night. "Feyenoord, Sporting Lisbon, Brentford, Man United, many games at the end we give away. At that level it's so difficult. It's not the first time unfortunately, it happened many times, that's why it's difficult."
City also struggle with balls into their box and from set-pieces, although that was not so obvious on Tuesday. It probably will be again soon, though.
One admirable thing about this team is that for all of those set-backs, they have come back the next game and run and pressed and fought like they should. There will be many post-mortems conducted on this season but, until now at least, nobody could ever say they have not fought.
They are just not good enough.
It might seem like a crazy statement to make about a team with so much quality but the big thing about them is that they have always been far more than the sum of their parts, they have always gelled together players perfectly suited to the roles they have been given.
Now, whether due to injuries, age or both, most of them are playing well below themselves and no longer look suited to what they have to do, most notably in midfield, where the lack of legs really is stark.
If they cannot keep the ball well and cannot win it back quickly, is it even a Guardiola team?
If one player embodies the determination to fight, to rage against the dying of the light, it is Kevin De Bruyne. Exactly like the team at large, there are sporadic bursts of quality and plenty of running, but it is patently obvious that his best days are behind him. That is no slight on him -- he has had some serious injuries to contend with over the past 18 months -- but it is the reality.
After City clinched a place in this play-off by beating Club Brugge, Guardiola said City are an "old team" and he mentioned De Bruyne (33), Ilkay Gundogan (34) and Kovacic, who is only 32 but has similar struggles to the other two.
Bernardo Silva has not been anywhere near his best either. They all look beaten, beleaguered.
Guardiola was talking about his team's chances ahead of the match and admitted that he just does not know what to expect. In the glory days he could never actually predict the result, but he could always be confident that they would put in a top performance.
"We've not been consistent when what's defined the team over the last decade has been that we are an incredible machine every three days," he said. "Now it's like, I don't know."
Yet, deep down, Guardiola must surely know what to expect from this team -- it is just not positive.
He must know the increased danger they face going into every match. He must know that they simply do not have the answers in many cases.
There must be part of him that even expects these results, unless the overwhelming positivity of top-level sportspeople simply does not allow him to.
His own management of the situation is starting to come under the microscope now, from within the City fanbase at least.
In fact, when discussing their unpredictability after the match on Tuesday, he revisited previous comments from the end of 2024 about his own inability to stop his team from making mistakes.
"I accept that when the opposition is better they are better, but I said months ago I am not good enough to give something to the team to manage these situations. It happened many times, that's the truth."
His starting line-ups and game plans have come into question. For months now, the old go-to Guardiola solutions have effectively become the problems: he still wants them to press high, to be aggressive, but because of that lack of energy and physicality in the middle, they leave huge spaces that they were never really any good at dealing with at their best, save for the end of the treble season. But then his defenders were fit and confident.
It was noticeable against Madrid on Tuesday that they kept their high line but, in the second half, they were not pressing. That is generally considered suicide. There is mitigation here: they are exhausted.
After Nico Gonzalez, the midfield reinforcement, got injured on his debut on Saturday, who was left to reinforce the middle when Ake could only manage an hour and De Bruyne had been flagging for ages? Kovacic and Gundogan.
Maybe when Gonzalez returns and Omar Marmoush, Abdukodir Khusanov and Vitor Reis bed in there will be a different dynamic, other players will get rest and performances will improve, but they have been in this vicious cycle for months and with Newcastle, Madrid and Liverpool coming up by the end of next week, things hardly look positive.
They did scare Madrid, going ahead twice. Maybe they can do it again next week because, were it not for those errors at the end, they would have won, despite their issues.
But those mistakes are the reality. The age of the team is the reality. The injuries are the reality. The fragility of the team is the reality. City still have quality and they still have fight, but it is not enough.