LOCKERROOM:All is well in the world of soccer as Leeds fans have a spring back in their step, writes Tom Humphries.

DOES ANYBODY else sort of run out of steam with this whole Premier League extravaganza? I mean round of applause and bouquets all round for coming up with a relatively exciting end to the season yesterday, but it just limps on so long and with so little romance that I can hardly feel my pulse at the end of it all.

I think I started to flag a little when I realised that not only was the football world shying away from inviting Leeds into next years Champions League as guests of honour/wildcard entries but they weren't even going to give us our 15 points back.

Does anybody really enjoy English football without having Leeds to hate? For Leeds fans it has been an odd season. In fact is has been a very odd century so far. The days of Davo and his babies have receded leaving nothing but a hard-to-remove fiscal stain and a tendency towards shuddering.

This season started off dreamlike as the boys razed everyone in sight. We say dreamlike but we mean it only as the sort of people who dream about being voted Least Unattractive Hobbit on a leper colony designed for the exclusive use of carnival freaks.

Still, winning is winning and for this Leeds fan it is the only time I feel like singing. It wasn't perfect of course. Ken Bates was and is chairman. Dennis Wise, who used to be his cabana boy or something, was manager. But the near-toxic levels of spivviness were offset by the presence of Gus Poyet. Gus is just a cool guy. Way too cool to be assistant to Wisey.

So before Christmas he vamoosed southwards and, as we had feared, when 50 per cent of the management team left he brought 80 per cent of the brain power with him. Leeds were in freefall before an intervention from BizarroWorld.

Newcastle, who amusingly were restaging the whole Keegan as Messiah production, pulled up in a long limo with smoked glass and crooked a finger at Wisey and told him they would love to see him in a little suit, in a little office pretending to be a little executive. And Wisey jumped into the limo without so much as leaving a batch of fresh towels at the foot of Ken Bates's king size.

If Davo was our Ronnie Reagan, events continued to prove that all American political life imitates Elland Road. The Wisey administration gave way to the Gary McAllister era. Gaz is much beloved by all of adequate taste and sensibility and his appointment was as popular as, say, the departure of Ken Bates might be.

And then Gaz announced his assistant manager. Stan The Gaffer Staunton. This was like the Bush administration making way for the presidency of Barrack Obama but Obama reaching out across party lines and appointing Dan Quayle as his veep.

(Have just been handed note pointing out that the Gaffer-sniping season ended some time ago. I am informed that it would be gracious to say that the appointment at Leeds allows Stan to develop a learning curve which should never have been tampered with by John Delaney. Point taken).

Anyway, Leeds revived themselves slowly, much one imagines to the relief of the football league, who must have been quietly chuffed when the club's early-season form looked like making the 15-point deduction a complete non-issue. The alarm bells must have been ringing in the countdown to the recent arbitration. Any decision to give Leeds back points which retrospectively altered the promotion or play-off standings would have brought an avalanche of lawsuits from elsewhere. A decision to deny Leeds their points refund had it cost them a play-off place would have invited all manner of Batesean shenanigans. As it was, Leeds made the play-off despite the deduction and despite the managerial input of Dennis Wise and Steve Staunton and this is quite clearly the footballing achievement of the season.

We mention this, the nascent stage of a new dynastic era for the world's most beloved club, not just that we might draw upon ourselves a shower of light-hearted and witty emails and letters from the banter-loving fans of lesser clubs but also to counterpoint the excitement Leeds fans have enjoyed with the drear of the Premier League.

The Prem came to an end yesterday with - oh, be still my irregularly beating heart - Manchester United and Chelsea slugging it out for the top spot. Granted, as PLCs go neither Manchester United nor Chelsea have chosen to follow the economic model put forward by Peter Ridsdale and implemented by Davo at Leeds just a short time ago.

Yes they can afford their foreign players and their Fancy Dan managers and their excursions into Europe and if that's the sort of thing they want well good luck to them. There is very little evidence, however, that this is what they want.

When Claudio Ranieri left Chelsea I thought he was hard done by. Can any man who sells Dennis Wise and brings in or brings through John Terry, Emmanuel Petit, Claude Makelele, Petr Cech, Eidur Gudjohnsen Arjen Robben, William Gallas, Frank Lampard and others be all bad? The smouldering Jose Mourinho came and went next. One of the best sideshows the Premier League had produced, I thought. And then Avram Grant, a genuinely interesting man of substance, it would seem. He has brought Chelsea to a Champions League final but only winning it by six or seven clear goals, three of which are scored by himself, seems likely to save his job.

What's the story? Poor Sven, who gave Manchester City the only good time the club has had since Quinny wore the Sky Blue, is also shuffling without dignity toward the revolving door. Reading, with whom many of us flirted shamelessly last year, are relegated and looking for a billionaire to buy them out. Roy Keane is making his angry face at the Drumaville consortium and will keep doing so till the pile of cash on the table is tall enough for the Drumavilleans to no longer be able to see the Throbbing Temple of Keano.

And as the season putters out, the talk was less of glory and romance than of profits and fees and agents and budgets. Which is a pity. We loved Christiano Ronaldo's exotic frippery, Drogba's Cathy-like pining for Heathcliff Mourinho and Kevin Keegan's straight face when offered the Newcastle gig again.

We liked the reassurance of seeing Martin O'Neill's Villa progress under his cerebral promptings. And we loved Andy Reid finding a home at last in the northeast. We miss old Martin Jol at Spurs and it's sad to think of Chrissie Hughton being cleared out of there too, but maybe next year we will see the point of Juande Ramos.

We enjoyed David Moyes, wept (well not really) for poor old Derby County and swooned occasionally at Arsenal.

Not a bad Premier League season but not a romantic one, an exercise in the haves lording it over the have-nots while Leeds, a one-club morality play concerning the have-nots who pretended to have, gave us the only stuff worth dreaming about.

I know. Sad. Sad. Sad.