The cardboard box story is the one Ian Rush summons up for the possibility, unthinkable though it still is to him, that the 2019-20 football season might actually be over and that Liverpool will be stranded up there for posterity, six points from glory.
It is the story of how the club's great drill sergeant coach Ronnie Moran would tell the players, within minutes of a league title being won, that the medals were in the box he had just thrown on a bench in the dressing room, if anyone really wanted to indulge themselves with a mere trinket like that.