Nearly 14 months after they last kicked a football in anger as a team, the Super Falcons were thrown straight into the thick of action with a friendly game against France, one of the world's top teams on Friday
It did not end well.
Africa's 10-time women's champions were handed an 8-0 hiding by the Europeans in a game that was a thoroughly humiliating episode for the West Africans, especially when the team at the wrong end of that whitewash are the continental champions.
Irrespective of the circumstances, such a bad loss saps confidence from the team and inevitably leads to fan and media hysteria about the state of the team.
Not all of that hysteria is unjustified.
Barring a player or two, the squad consisted of most of the country's first-team players.
To see them so easily taken apart in a mauling of that magnitude by the French was a clear indication that the Super Falcons have regressed.
It's not entirely their fault.
Since winning the African Women Nations Cup in 2016, the Nigerian women have not trained at all together, let alone play a single game.
In that time, they were also been without a coach until Thomas Dennerby was appointed in late January.
This friendly happened to be his first major assignment with the first team, an assignment for which he had just two training sessions to prepare his side to face a world-class side.
In that same period where the Falcons were hibernating, the French had played a total of 10 games. Their opposition included Switzerland, Italy, Austria, England, Germany and the USA. The last three came in March at the She Believes Cup.
France came into the game a well-oiled, finely tuned machine ready to deal destruction and damage to the rickety, ill-prepared contraption that was the Super Falcons.
They did just that.
Lacking coordination and barely able to find each other on the field, the African champions were run ragged and picked apart almost at will. There was even time for Faith Ikidi to poke home an extraordinary own goal in support of the French.
Bad as the result and the performance was, there were still some positives to take from it.
First, with all the focus on the Super Eagles, the Falcons have been the neglected ugly little duckling of the family.
No coach, no training camps, no fixtures.
This game would have shown just how bad a mistake that is. Allowing a national team to go for over a year without a coach or game leads to a scandalous result like this.
The plus side of that is that Dennerby, if he did not know before, can now understand the scale of the task ahead of him.
His wards need not just games upon games ahead of the looming qualifiers in front of them, but hours and hours of training time to imbibe whatever system he needs them to play.
Whether he can get his foreign-based players out to these games is another kettle of fish entirely, but even his domestic-based players are also lacking in match fitness.
The Nigerian women's league has been on break for nearly half a year since the last campaign ended in October 2017.
Thankfully, the new league season began again this past weekend, which should help Dennerby's charges get up to speed.
By now, both coach and federation have a good idea of what the Falcons need to do to. Start immediately, and the team can maybe creep their way back to the top of the continent.
If they waste further time, they face the real possibility of failing to qualify for even the African Women Nations Cup, which would have been an unthinkable reality last year.
Believe it or not, that is a clear and present danger