Like the end of a Shakespeare play, nothing now remains that was before.
In the starting line-up today were six players who will not pull on Celtic shirts again.
The coaching staff will leave under a cloud.
They were there replacing a manager who’s already been dispatched.
The CEO has fallen on his sword.
The entire football department has been gutted.
The curtain falls on a pile of bodies, as though someone had wheeled out all the dead of MacBeth and deposited them in front of us.
This season has been ghastly.
So where did it all go wrong? Could this have been avoided?
Were there moments along the way which could have changed the course and saved us from the depressing fate we’re facing up to today; a club rent asunder and having to built anew?
One thing is clear; it didn’t begin this season.
We’ve been in this malaise for a while now, and the signs of it were obvious two seasons before, and that’s where you have to start if you really want to take a proper look at where we are and how we got here.
This season’s events didn’t happen in a vacuum.
They are the result of years of neglect at various levels of the club, and a style at the top of the house which has bred disaster.
Everything about this mess could have been avoided, had we made the right decision in February of 2019.
The failure to do that will haunt us and all involved for a long time to come.
But the biggest failure by far was allowing Peter Lawwell to be CEO for 17 years.
He was already arrogant and hubristic and tended to think he knew more about football than he did, and his constant interference was costly, never more so than his role in making Brendan Rodgers walk out of Celtic Park in the abysmal manner that he did.
So in looking at this disaster, that’s where we have to begin.