Those ripoff Weird Al songs Premier League fans sing about players and managers are charming the first few times but by about minute seventeen of matchday one I’ve had enough of them for the season. I still can’t hear “Feel The Noise”—which I don’t hear as often now that I no longer attend many division three hockey games—without mentally inserting David Moyes’s name into the hook, and I watched no more than four or five United matches that year because they were so grim. But these impulses grip you whether you like them or not, and I have on occasion crooned to my empty living room that he’s all sunshine, Heung Min Son and that lo-ving you is easy Roberto Firmino. Which: a.) it really isn’t; Firimino’s a pretty frustrating player, and b.) Chris Berman could probably come up with these if you gave him a team sheet, an hour, and three Bud heavies.

So having established that I’m a simpleton dot-connector, I say, to the tune of Neko Case’s “Margaret vs. Pauline,” that everything’s so easy for Juve. This isn’t even a sound-alike; I’m just going on syllables, but a man has to occupy himself intellectually in the second half of yet another gruelingly dominant two-nil Serie A victory for a club that nearly have more scudettos than Milan and Inter combined. (Inter is the fragment of a name. Okay, I’ll stop.) I’ve seen defenses better than Juve’s, but Mourinho’s Inter and Simeone’s circa 2014 Atleti made defending seem like the taxing task that it is—all veiny-foreheaded focus and wingers screaming back into the picture to hold up a break—while Juve seem almost smugly calm. They know the five places on the pitch from which you can score and they’re simply not going to let you go there. Beyond that, do whatever you want. They’ve derelict step-dads until suddenly they’re a video game god-hand, picking you up and putting you where you belong, which is thirty yards from goal, with six black-and-white-striped bodies in front of you. They’ll do this for ninety minutes, against Barcelona. 

Of course Real Madrid pummeled them in the second half of Champions League final, but Madrid do that, which is to say ruin metaphor and replace it with twenty-nine reallys in front of an emphatic good. That Juve haven’t yet won a European title during this post-Calciopoli scandal run of success they’re enjoying is an aberration, the universe’s computer spitting out some cock-eyed math, because they’ve been so serenely dominant under Antonio Conte and now Massimiliano Allegri that they’ve deserved a spotless season, if only to make the facts line up with the untroubled way they play. If Gigi Buffon ever got to lift Big Ears, I believe he’d do it with levitation.

The other, less joyful side of this is that Juve have blotted out the rest of Italy like a snowdrift recently. The Milan clubs haven’t been up to their lofty mid-aughts standards for a long while now, and while Napoli and Roma are brave and stylish sides, they usually end up fighting each other for second place more fiercely than they do Juve for the league title. Serie A is typically wrapped up in January or February, Juve are ten points clear and already figuring out squad rotations so they head into their Champions League knockout fixtures with their strongest starting eleven well-rested. The grind of league games in every country is sleepier than the commercials for BURNLEY VS. WEST HAM! or REAL BETIS VS. GIRONA! let on, but I’ve stared at the Serie A table late in the year and wondered if maybe Lazio and Roma could get over their whole historic rift—which as I understand, isn’t about anything important or relevant to the modern world anyway—and merge their squads in a bid to take on the Old Lady together.

It can’t go so frictionlessly on forever for Juve. Financial Fair Play might have permanently cemented them as title favorites for the foreseeable future—the new stadium they built in 2011 brings in way more revenue than the San Siro or the Stadio Olimpico—but there are always odd surprises even in relatively settled continental leagues. But until Inter enter the vanguard of some tactical revolution or Napoli manage a beautifully janky impression of Pep’s Barça over a full season, Juve are going to persist in this nigh untouchable stage of their history where they swallow opponents like a tranquilizing fog. 

For example, Bayern Munich, with all their fluidity and one-twos and thirty-five yard diagonal balls, couldn’t make Mario Mandžukić pretty. Juve stuck the six-foot-three Croat who runs like he’s got webbed feet out on the left wing and he scored a downright balletic volley in the Champions League final. Because Allegri’s a sharp coach and Mandzu is his sport’s Rasheed Wallace—he knows a lot more than you’d think, given those faces he makes—and because, truly, everything’s so easy for Juve.

Or it was until just after that shot sailed past Keylor Navas. What you make up in your head doesn’t always stand up to reality. But Juve got close to perfection there. And they will again soon.

More 'End-To-End Stuff': Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United, Atletico Madrid, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund