Judd Trump brought the curtain down on the 2018/19 snooker season on Monday with a quite superb performance to win the World Championship at the Crucible Theatre.
The 29 year-old had fellow players, fans, and pundits alike running out of superlatives to describe his near faultless display against four-time champion John Higgins in Sheffield.
It adds a maiden success on the greatest stage of them all to his CV and it’ll be very interesting to see if the “Ace” can replicate this kind of standard throughout next season.
Indeed, fast forward eleven or so months and Trump could find himself in the position to break the “Curse of the Crucible” – the hoodoo that has seen no first-time champion return to repeat the feat the following year.
It’s a bit early to be considering such outcomes, though, and it’s now time for most of us to take a well-deserved breather for a couple of months.
The provisional calendar for the 2019/20 campaign was released by World Snooker on Tuesday and features many of the same tournaments that we’ve become familiar with over the last few years.
Several events outside of the UK, particularly in China, have still to be confirmed, but one competition that is set to return is the World Cup.
A ten-year deal for the biennial invitational tournament was announced by Barry Hearn, with the 2019 edition scheduled for the end of June in Wuxi.
Launching the season will first be the annual pilgrimage to Q School for a bunch of amateurs hoping to graduate onto the Main Tour.
There’s never been a greater opportunity than there will be this May, with an unprecedented 16 spots up for grabs in Wigan.
The first ranking event of the new campaign will again be the Riga Masters, taking place towards the end of July when the new season starts to gather its early momentum.
Just like any other, the 2018/19 snooker season was packed full of drama and excitement as fans were treated to more live action than ever before.
Nitpicking will result in people criticising certain situations but the reality is that the sport is in a richly healthy state, with an almost constant availability of cue action to follow throughout the year.
Between the World Snooker ranking events and invitationals, as well as the enhancement of the World Seniors Tour, there were more than 30 trophies handed out.
That’s not even including the improvements in the World Women’s Tour and the WDBS, or the introduction of the satellite Challenge Tour.
There was a lot to take in and maybe even the most hardened supporter might have forgotten some of it.
The question is then, can you remember the event winners in the 2018/19 snooker season?