WE have all missed this feeling.

It’s been way too long since the Brick Community Stadium as it’s now called echoed to the sound of the Wire faithful’s songbook, which had a couple of catchy new additions.

And as one of them goes, you can’t start a fire without a spark and once Luke Yates provided it in the game’s very first hit-up, The Wire were simply unstoppable from there.

The primrose and blue army gathered behind the posts will have arrived hopeful of victory, with confidence in the players representing them sky-high after what happened at St Helens the previous week, but all the while knowing that they were heading to what had been an impregnable fortress over the past 14 months.

While they may have hoped for a victory, nobody could have expected something so dominant as what happened next.

With the ball, Wire bristled with the kind of intent and precision that has underpinned the vast majority of their displays, with Wigan’s patched-up right edge targeted with brutal efficiency.

It is easy to point to the players the hosts had on the field – and perhaps more pertinently, those they didn’t – as being the sole reason for what happened, and you have to wonder how different things would have been had star duo Bevan French and Jai Field been available.

However, Wire have been burnt in the recent past by a seemingly disadvantaged Wigan side – take last year’s Challenge Cup quarter-final when Wire could not find a way past a team who played for 73 minutes with 12 men, for example.

In truth, putting the result purely down to French and Field’s absence plus that of Adam Keighran from the centres would be doing Warrington a great disservice. They had enough out there to at the very least make the game more competitive than it was.

The simple fact of the matter is that in every possible area – including through the middle where many had expected Wigan to dominate – Wire were far superior.

And as such, a push to finish top of the pile that looked so unlikely just a few short weeks ago is now very much alive thanks to a squad that has proved itself to be entirely trustworthy.

With so much focus on who Wigan had missing, it’s only fair to balance that with the fact Wire had at least five players who would have been in their 17 if fit – James Harrison, Lachlan Fitzgibbon, Toby King, Joe Philbin and Leon Hayes – sat in the stands along with a few others.

Fitzgibbon and King’s absences meant the left edge had a slightly youthful look about it, but Adam Holroyd and in particular Arron Lindop stepped in like seasoned pros.

Lindop’s prodigious talent has been the stuff of legend within the club for some time, but this was perhaps the clearest and most public demonstration of how good he potentially could be.

With reinforcements to come, it is difficult to fathom this Wire side going backwards and they appear to be building towards a big crescendo.