Whether it's a product of the time of year or something in the water, strange things have happened at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship in recent years.
The first six renewals of an event still in its infancy were fairly easy to digest. Chris DiMarco was 10th in the world when he beat Henrik Stenson to the first, Paul Casey was 15th when he won the second, and though Martin Kaymer was securing his first European Tour title in the third, he did so having been named Rookie of the Year late the previous year.
Casey and Kaymer exchanged titles again before the German took his third in 2011, but then - well, then Robert Rock saw off Tiger Woods. Then Jamie Donaldson beat Justin Rose. Then Pablo Larrazabal beat Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy. Then Gary Stal reversed a 10-shot deficit with Kaymer.
After Tommy Fleetwood defied an abysmal record at the course to win here 12 months ago at the expense of Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler now serves as an outlier. Like his fellow American of a decade earlier, Fowler was inside the world's top 10 and his 2016 victory could not be called a surprise.
It's this series of curious events which has in the past steered me away from the temptation to be found at the top of the market, in search - however difficult - of that surprise champion.
This year, however, there are a few reasons to expect some kind of normality to be restored but I'm going to predict something that might in its own way serve as a surprise - victory at last for Rory McIlroy.
Quite how he hasn't already won this, I'm not sure. McIlroy has a bonkers record in the Middle East, where he's chasing an 11th successive top-10 finish, and he's won four times in Dubai itself: twice in the DP World Tour Championship, and twice over at the Omega Dubai Desert Classic where he was a 3/1 chance three years ago.
On three separate occasions he's lost by a single shot here, and while unable to do much about Stal's career-best 65, the other two were events he'll feel he should have won. In 2012, McIlroy incurred a penalty for brushing away sand when he wasn't supposed to, and in 2014 he managed to pick up another for failing to take full relief from a spectator walkway. Much happened after both, but given the consistency of his scoring it's easy enough to argue that at least one title was lost to a technicality.