With Leeds United on the cusp of a return to the Premier League for the first time since relegation from the top-flight in 2004, the city is enjoying a buzz around its football team not seen since the turn of the millennium.
Wind the clock back 20 years, and the Elland Road outfit were battling for silverware both domestically and on the continent, with David O'Leary's young side regarded as one of the most exciting in Europe.
The likes of Harry Kewell, Jonathan Woodgate, Alan Smith and Paul Robinson all emerged from the club's academy within the space of a few years, and with chairman Peter Ridsdale willing to spend big to supplement his homegrown talents, there was a belief Leeds would become a powerhouse of the English game.
Financial mismanagement and off-field issues with players saw that all unravel, however, and by the start of the 2007-08 season the West Yorkshire giants were kicking-off a season in the third tier of English football for the first time. But there remains fond memories of the good times at Leeds while hope lives eternal that they will battle back to where they were two decades ago.
One member of that squad was Martin Hiden - a defender capped 50 times by Austria who joined Leeds in 1998.
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Though he only made 26 appearances for the club before departing two years later, he looks back affectionately on a period when O'Leary brought the enjoyment back to Leeds after a run of underwhelming seasons under ex-Arsenal coach George Graham.
"For him [Graham], having a clean sheet was a sanctuary," he told Goal and SPOX in an exclusive interview. "O'Leary adapted the style of play more to us players and was also much closer to us. He participated in all the fun.
"I came at exactly the right time. When I came over, Alan Smith was still cleaning boots, and a few months later he was an integral part of the team.
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"I was 24 years old at the time and I was already among the older players. We were a young, wild, conspiratorial team full of great talent."
Having signed for Leeds in January 1998, Hiden helped them to a fifth-placed finish during his first few months in England before playing a minor role in the Whites finishing fourth and third respectively in 1999 and 2000.
The latter of those seasons also saw O'Leary's side reach the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup, knocking out the likes of Roma, Spartak Moscow and Slavia Prague along the way.
Their last-four tie with Galatasaray will always be overshadowed by the murders of Leeds supporters Kevin Speight and Christopher Loftus on the eve of the first leg in Istanbul, with the Premier League outfit eventually falling to a 4-2 aggregate defeat to the competition's eventual winners.
That season marked the first time teams from the Champions League would drop into the competition if they finished third in the group stage, with both Galatasaray and beaten finalists Arsenal benefiting from the new rule to continue their European campaigns into the second half of the season.
As such, Hiden and the rest of the squad felt that they were the true winners of the competition as they, along with fellow semi-finalists Lens, went furthest in the tournament of those teams that played in the first round.
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"Internally, we still felt we were the UEFA Cup winners," the 47-year-old, who has now moved into coaching, admits.
"We always said: 'Two of the other three semi-finalists were relegated from the Champions League differently than we were during the season and that's why we are the real winners'."
Hiden would leave in the summer of 2000, but the arrivals of players such as Mark Viduka and Rio Ferdinand over the next six months further bolstered a Leeds squad that was embarking on a first Champions League season since 1992 and only their second since reaching the European Cup final in 1975.
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They would take on the likes of Barcelona, AC Milan and Real Madrid before eventually falling at the semi-final stage after a 3-0 aggregate defeat to Valencia.
After an almost unthinkable run of events, four years later they would be relegated from the Premier League, with no return having yet been secured; something Hiden would scarcely would have believed had you told him the club's future upon his departure.
"At that point [in 2007 after relegation to League One] there was no one I knew from back then," he says. "Nobody in my time could have imagined that it would come to this.
"There was a real sense of optimism at the time and everything was developing in the right direction. The club could have been very successful for many, many years."