I don’t know about you, but I have good memories of stopping Rangers doing ten in a row; it was a celebration of Celtic.
We had been in the wilderness a long time, and amidst the great surge of relief there was the knowledge that a black period had ended and that a new dawn had broken.
There were only two points along the way when I am conscious of having considered the impact our triumph had across the city. One before it, and one after it.
The one before it was in a bar called The Punchbowl, on Maryhill Road, where I used to go and watch The Peatdiggers.
At the time I was trying my hand at writing song lyrics and they used to let me try some of them out on stage.
One day, about a month or so before the season ended, I got up to do a number and I decided to say something beforehand about the years of waiting and living in the shadow of Murray.
I can’t remember the specifics but I remember the basics; it was something along the lines of “when the day finally comes, think of everyone who gave it to you tight these past nine years and enjoy the knowledge that they are suffering.”
That was it until the league had been won, and a week later they played the Scottish Cup Final against Hearts.
I had been drunk for just about the full duration, and I can honestly say that they barely entered my consciousness at all.
Until that afternoon.
I watched that game with the guys in The Punchbowl and I have to admit that was all about their pain.
In the years that have followed I have never associated a triumph of ours with anything to do with them. I took no more satisfaction in beating them to the league titles than I did on those cup final days when we beat other clubs.
When we win I don’t think of them at all.
Everything out of Ibrox in the past week and a half has been spiteful.
How many “we’ve broken them” posts have you read on Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else?
Broken us how though? Because they can’t stop thinking about how this affected us?
I’ll tell you how it affected most of us; not at all.
Most of us have other things on our minds.
Most of us accepted the reality that they would be champions months ago.
Most of us are focussed on what Celtic does next.
Focussed on our own club. Imagine that.
An alien concept to them over at Ibrox, for sure.
Most of us are outraged that they thought they could break the law with impunity, but as I wrote on here previously, their pitifully daft stunts such as overflying an empty stadium trailing a banner are mostly too stupid even to bother about.
As are the Castore billboards.
Can you climb inside the mind-set where they have actually spent money to address Celtic fans, most of whom are still taking lockdown seriously and will never see the damned things in the first place?
Was this their triumph, or something that happened to us?
Remind me again, because there have been times in the last week and a half when I’ve only been half sure that they won something, and not that we had lost it.
So much of that time has been spent, by their fans and directors and players as well, thinking about what we must be thinking about it all.
I can tell you what I think of it all; I’m confused.
I’m confused that the bulk of their support isn’t actually mortified by all the focus over there on how we feel.
I mean, Glasgow’s Green And White, when it went up on the banners and billboards, was a pure expression of Celtic and our joy at our own victory.
Today’s crass behaviour is more like what Manchester City did when they put up the Tevez “Welcome to Manchester” ones.
Alex Ferguson called that out as being possessed of a “small club mentality” and he was correct … and so is this Castore nonsense.
Can’t they just enjoy their own moment without this kind of childishness?
For the last nine days it’s been pretty clear that the answer is no.
[snack-countdown title=”Celtic’s Countdown To Champions League Disaster” date=”06/20/2021″ time=”00:00:00″ colour=”#000″ textColour=”#FFF”]