Photo: Bryan Berlin / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

There's a version of last season where Mauricio Pochettino walks back through the doors at Hotspur Way, and everything feels, for a moment at least, a little less bleak. That version never happened. But it turns out it was closer to reality than most of us realised.

Pochettino has now confirmed what plenty of us suspected during the darkest weeks of Thomas Frank's sacking and Igor Tudor's brief, doomed spell in interim charge. Tottenham did go and knock on his door.

For those who need reminding just how bad things got, Spurs were sitting one point above the relegation zone by the end of March, staring down the barrel of a first relegation in nearly half a century. Tudor lasted 44 days and didn't win a single league game. It was, by any measure, a genuine crisis.

Roberto De Zerbi eventually signed on for the long haul on a five-year deal, and in hindsight that looks like exactly the right call. But before Levy and co. got there, they went back to an old flame.

The problem, as Pochettino tells it, was timing and honestly, it's hard to argue with him.

"The problem was that the timings were never the best," he said. "When I was free, I never received a contact. And then when I was working, I received a contact, but I cannot make the decision to come back. It was a little bit unlucky."

That's about as clean a summary of Tottenham's managerial merry-go-round as you'll get. When he was available, the club didn’t call. When he wasn't available, the club called.

By the time Spurs actually reached out, Pochettino was neck-deep in preparations for a home World Cup with the USA, a tournament he'd go on to guide them into the last 16 of. There was never really a decision to make. He was contracted, committed, and not about to walk out on his own country's tournament to bail out a former club, however much history there is between them.

And there is history. Five and a half years, a Champions League final, two genuine title tilts in 2016 and 2017 - Pochettino built the modern version of this club almost from scratch. That connection doesn't fade just because he's since managed PSG, Chelsea, and now the USMNT in the years since.

What's interesting is how matter-of-fact Pochettino is about the whole saga. There's no false modesty about being wanted, but equally no suggestion that Spurs' approach was some grand romantic gesture. He's pretty blunt about why the call came when it did.

"They were under pressure to bring another coach, to give him the possibility to stay for a long period like happened with De Zerbi," he explained. "It was an obvious situation. In this moment, they called everyone, they called all the coaches. Free and not free."

In other words, Tottenham were drowning, and they rang round every name they could think of. Pochettino just happened to be one of the calls that didn't land.

Does the door stay open? He certainly isn't slamming it shut.

"If I was free, of course I come. But I wasn't free, I was preparing for the World Cup," he said, before adding the line that will keep this story alive for years yet: "Maybe one day the stars will align, and it can happen."

For now, De Zerbi is the man in the dugout and, teething problems aside, there's no great appetite among the fanbase to go looking elsewhere. But knowing Spurs' history with the Argentine, I wouldn't bet against his name coming up again the next time things wobble in north London.