Boro's 6-1 victory over Derby County in March 1997 was a rather deceptive match. It's not that the victory wasn't deserved - it was. It's not that it wasn't Boro's biggest league win of the season - it was. It's not that it didn't feature Fabrizio Ravanelli's third Boro hat-trick - it did.
It's just that it's very easy to look back at the scoreline, the attendance - wow, a full Riverside! - and the foreign legion and think, what a magnificent occasion! Except it wasn't really.
In the run up to Ravanelli's first and second Boro hat-tricks, against Liverpool and Hereford respectively, Boro had marched into the matches on a tidal wave of optimism, created firstly by the summer signings and secondly by three successive league victories. By the time we faced Derby, there were only twelve league games left and two gruelling cup runs had taken their toll on a rather shallow squad. Worse still, we were five points adrift at the bottom of the Premiership. "Bottomsbrough", indeed.
The signs of improvement we had shown since the deduction of those three points, in a 4-2 win over Sheffield Wednesday, a 1-1 draw with Wimbledon and an extremely unlucky 1-0 defeat against Newcastle were undone by, in Bryan Robson's words, a return to the "bad old ways" in a 3-1 defeat to Sheffield Wednesday at Hillsborough. Although Robbo had really not helped himself by reverting to his own "bad old" five at the back tactic in place of the more solid 4-4-2 that had proved to be much more effective.
At the time, I was willing to write off the match against Derby as another defeat before it had even begun. To me, even the arrival of Gianluca Festa and a young Mark Schwarzer had been falsely promising; the way Boro had played at Hillsborough on March 1, I was convinced that they could lose to anybody. Three wonderful weeks and four league victories later, Boro's season was transformed. And this was the game that kicked it off.
The win over Derby - Ravanelli's future club in addition to then future Boro boss Steve McClaren's current club (he was Rams boss Jim Smith's assistant manager before joining Big Nose at the Theatre Of Dreams in 1999) - was one of those games that showed you how any big win, regardless of how well the team plays on the day, can psychologically rally round a team and get them performing again. We weren't amazing here; Derby could have been at least two up in the first twenty minutes either side of Ravanelli's missed sitter, before popular Slovak Vladimir Kinder fired us ahead with a long-range effort that deceived Derby goalkeeper Russell Hoult.
The match was arguably a game of two goalkeepers, with Schwarzer's frame denying Dean Sturridge an equaliser minutes before Ravanelli's shot was helped into his own net by Hoult. If Schwarzer's presence was inspiring Boro, Hoult's was doing the exact opposite for Derby. The goalkeeper who had been so imperious when we'd faced him at the Baseball Ground in November 1996 had suddenly developed a severe case of the butterfingers. He trembled as both Craig Hignett and Mikkel Beck calmly stroked the ball past him, and handed Ravanelli's second goal to him on a plate before being rounded by The White Feather for the Italian's third goal - and Boro's sixth. Although to be fair to Hoult, the charity offered by the Derby defence to Boro's attack in the last ten minutes was more than a little shocking. It was as if they'd switched off following Hignett's goal, only coming to life again when Paul Simpson took the chance to deny Schwarzer a clean sheet with a stunning free kick.
It was hardly a model performance, but it was still a vital confidence boost that would set us in good stead to make progress in both cups and creep out of the relegation zone. Of course, such progress would come at a price; that Juninho-inspired week of wins later on in March would give Martin O'Neill something to think about before Wembley. But we were back on track - even if it did all end in tears.
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