A missed opportunity.
After a poor first lap of the Premiership season, results elsewhere presented the Dons with an unexpected chance to end the second inside the top four.
All that was required was a comfortable victory over the league’s bottom team, winless and without having registered a goal on their travels.
St Johnstone are nonetheless, as Celtic had already found, a tough nut to crack.
They are more than capable of resisting sporadic periods of pressure on their goal; it is incumbent upon opponents to make them defend it for the majority of the 90 minutes and keep respite to a minimum.
By largely coasting through an almost entirely uneventful first half, Aberdeen allowed Saints to keep more than enough in the tank to fend off whatever they mustered after the break.
Not that it was much more than the fleeting excitement of pouncing on scraps and optimistic penalty shouts.
It seems odd to say it of a side which had netted seven times across its previous two league fixtures but this Aberdeen team is still struggling to find an attacking strategy which will enable it to consistently carve out presentable looks at goal.
The coaching staff will have plenty of time to try to come up with some better scripts before the side is next in action, but they will be severely limited in their ability to rehearse them with Bojan Miovski and Duk jetting off on international duty.
Perhaps that presents an opening for either or both of Ester Sokler and Pape Habib Gueye to establish chemistry with some of those others left behind at Cormack Park, and provide a much needed spark when the quest to return to the sharp end of the table resumes in a fortnight’s time.
A change, of some sort, must come.