Every Premier League title race must have a single moment that crystallises all that we’ve seen, not just to decide the destination but to summarise what the winners stand for and why it was their fate to be champions this year.
But the image isn’t usually satire. There was something poetic to the anti-romance that was watching Chris Kavanagh watch a small screen, surrounded by players watching Chris Kavanagh watch a small screen.
Modern football is a million people staring at a VAR replay, forever.
And fitting, of course, that Kavanagh was scrutinising a typical set-piece brawl, a plague that has descended slowly over the Premier League season the last few years.
Fitting too because this is Arsenal, the kings of set-pieces, although the irony here was that Kavanagh’s final call was to deny the very dark arts that have become such a staple of Arsenal’s corner routines.
Thankfully the decision was correct. It took a long time for the referees to disallow Callum Wilson’s equaliser but only because the enormity of the moment demanded it.
Had this been in the 35th minute of a mid-January match the call would have been made in less than 10 seconds.
David Raya tries to catch the ball in two hands but cannot jump properly to claim it because Pablo's arm is across his throat: it is a no-brainer, the correct decision no matter how many other fouls might have occurred in the six-yard vicinity.
The whataboutery from West Ham and Manchester City fans is understandable – we would all cry foul, or rather not foul, in their position – but there is a long-established pattern of focusing on contact that happens near the action.
This one was right in the heart of it - and it was a foul, clear as day.
Nevertheless it leaves us with a few existential questions.
The obvious take is to praise VAR’s existence and forgive its many defects, but that would be to cave in to VAR’s mechanising, mathematising view of the sport.
Fundamentally what has been lost isn’t just the ability to celebrate a goal, nor the uninterrupted flow, but the basic capacity to accept that referees are fallible and the laws of the game impossible to apply consistently; that mistakes are a part of football, not a contravention of its natural state.
Aside from those generational burning injustices – Maradona’s hand of god, Thierry Henry’s handball against Ireland – referees missing things never used to be so tortuously scrutinised. Instead it was understood to be just another chaotic, semi-random variable in a sport that dishes out cruelty and joy dispassionately.
If there was no VAR in the Premier League West Ham would have drawn 1-1 with Arsenal and there would be outrage, yes, but once the dust had settled there would also be universal acknowledgement that West Ham bought their own luck with those late chances and that Arsenal should have grabbed the second goal or kept the ball away from their end.
But we do have VAR, it’s here to stay, and it colours everything.
It even made a team like Arsenal possible: obsessed with controlling the variables, reducing football to its most logical and mathematical elements.
Mikel Arteta’s vision is VAR made flesh, a strategy that could only have been devised in an era when millimetre offside calls will be seen, when infringements from corner melees will be pored over.
VAR has created the reality in which a team can rely upon the technology’s pernickety sensibilities and make them a virtue.
Arsenal will surely win the title from here, easily dispatching of Burnley at home and then Crystal Palace’s reserves at Selhurst Park just three days before their Europa Conference League final.
They will be deserving champions: the best team in the country but also the team perfectly sculpted for the age in which we live.
Arsenal’s defining moment was always going to be a corner, the Premier League’s was always going to put VAR in the spotlight.
It isn’t the dazzling end to the title race we wanted. But in a fairly forgettable year once again dominated by the screen experience, it’s the ending Arsenal have earned - and the ending we deserve.
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