A new multi-million pound state-of-the-art stadium and a team we’re promised will continue to play a brave and bold brand of passing football.
As Dundee FC celebrates its 125th birthday, the future, under American owners, looks bright and exciting.
The problem, as any long-suffering Dundee fan will tell you, is the history of the Dark Blues has been littered with promises that, if not always plain false, have not come to fruition.
That means, for many, the attitude regarding the plans listed in the first line is very much one of seeing will be believing.
And, while it’s not their fault, it’s a fact the current US-based owners just have to live with.
A league game against Celtic in America apart, they have pretty much delivered what they said they would.
The team has returned to the Premiership and stayed there for the past four seasons, not always as comfortably as they would like, but they have and that’s the most important thing.
They’ve also brought a level of financial stability that would be the envy of many of the previous Dens Park regimes of the past 30 years or so.
Yes, the club has been running at loss under them and any business expert would say theirs is not the ideal financial model for a football club.
But so long as millionaire owner Tim Keyes is prepared to back the Dark Blues with his dollars, it is one that can work.
For all that, any look at what the future will hold for Dundee Football Club has to include the use of words like uncertain and if. It was, of course, ever thus when predicting what may be in store for a football club.
On the pitch, however good the squad may look, successful results can never be taken for granted.
The season just ended is an example of that. While it would not be realistic to expect Dundee to finish in the top four, there was reason to believe the players should have been good enough to have mounted a serious challenge to make the Premiership’s top six.
That they didn’t was disappointing but, despite some complaint about that, the reality of a club the size of Dundee is that any campaign that ends with them still in the top division has to be acceptable.
The hope has to be that, with the right additions, next term will see that top-six challenge materialise.
If it does, it can become a regular occurrence.
As for the new stadium, it goes back to that phrase – seeing will be believing.
The plans are impressive and the feeling the best bet for the future is to move away from Dens, home for the last 119 years but now ageing and in many ways impractical, is a sensible one.
But the aim was the first spade would be in the ground at what’s been dubbed “Nou Campy” just north of the Kingsway and adjacent to Camperdown Park at some point this summer.
Yes, there’s another couple of months to go before that becomes a false promise but, with no final planning permission in place as yet, time is running out.
Of course, even if that’s what comes to pass, it doesn’t mean the stadium won’t be built.
As we’ve seen up the coast at Aberdeen, such projects can be delayed, delayed and delayed again.
If Nou Campy never gets off the ground, it doesn’t have to follow the club will be plunged into the latest of what down the years have been many crises.
For many fans, wherever the team is playing, so long as it continues to be backed by the Keyes cash and is riding high in the Premiership, that bright future will have arrived.
This article originally appeared on the Evening Telegraph website. For more information, read about our new combined website.