Back in the "meltdown" days of last summer many Saints supporters were predicting relegation rather than improvement on last seasons performances, how wrong they were.
Many Saints fans feared the worse last summer as several key players left the club as well as the manager, what they didn't realise and in fairness could barely have dreamed of realising was that in most cases we were upgrading.
I said back then on a number of occasions that in football indeed in life it is never about what has happened it is all about what you do next and although it cannot be denied that Saints did do some things wrongly back then due to the swiftness of events and inexperience in the Boardroom of such things, the fact that we did have a well thought out plan to go forward meant that the situation was a drama and never became a crisis.
It didn't feel like that at the time though and the key was Ronald Koeman, if we had not got him in although I think we would have been comfortable in the League I do not think we would have been able to mount this sustained challenge that we have done for a top four spot.
Perhaps a measure of how much we have moved forward can be judged by the fact that after Saturday's 2-0 win over Burnley we are now only three points short of last season's total of 56 points with eight games still to go and that is some feat.
Like last season the top seven see a big gap between them and the team in eighth and we aim to keep it that way and more.
This season is different though, although the club finishing eighth will probably need around the 53-56 points total we needed last year, to finish sixth could need less points than the 69 amassed by Tottenham Hotspur although only slightly less, indeed Manchester United will almost certainly not need the 79 points to finish fourth that Arsenal achieved for the same position in 2013/14.
But from a Saints perspective its good to see that we have made progress and that we can build on that progress both in the last eight games and hopefully next season.