After today’s storming performance, who can stop this rampaging Celtic team?

There are some games when the headline isn’t immediately obvious. An excellent result can have equally impressive performances right across the team, and actually i think there were a few incredible displays today from some of the players in our side, but it’s perfectly obvious that one display towered over all the others.

Today belongs to Luke McCowan. Man of the match by a mile, with a goal and three assists. For all that, there’s already some discussion over whether or not he’ll play on Wednesday night. He’s done himself no harm at all, that’s fact.

That this is even up for debate is extraordinary, but there is a good case to be made for a team without him in it. The strength of this squad is so good now, the quality of it greater than anything we’ve had in a long time.

Today we dropped six players, all of whom would walk into any other side in the country, and hardly noticed they were gone. The best player in the country right now was on the bench and stayed there, all the better to keep him fit for Wednesday. That’s a measure of the power in this team. That’s why we look so formidable.

And we have goals everywhere. McGregor is having his best season getting in amongst them than he has since Rodgers first campaign. Idah got another, and it was a peach, and only a fingertip save in the second half denied him a second. He had a great game, harrying and harassing their defence. So too did Bernardo, who got a deserved goal of his own. Then there was Liam Scales; he strolled through that today and got a goal … and an assist.

So you drop the most productive player at the club to keep him rested. Does the side miss his running, his goals, his assists? No because others turn in great displays and they pick up the slack instead. Who can stop us here at home? It’s a serious question and it has implications for more than just our own club, of course, because the more we dominate the greater our shadow looms over whoever is in the Ibrox hot-seat.

If their manager was struggling in a season where we also were, you could see how changing their manager might improve their fortunes. But we’re dominating to such an extent that anyone who takes that job is depending more on a Celtic implosion than they are on their own particular set of skills.

This side will take some stopping, and anyone coming into a job where success depends on enough other sides being able to do that to us to offset any damage his own weaknesses and those of his club inflict on him is not a guy who is going to be secure in that job for long and that’s the problem without a solution for them … whatever they do over there, they are still relying on other teams being able to beat Celtic once in a while.

And how likely does that look, based on that first half?

This Celtic side can achieve anything it realistically sets its sights on. I don’t know when the Invincible Treble talk started for real last time around but I hear it everywhere, in conversations all over the place, right now. Rodgers himself has said that this is a better team than the one which achieved that incredible feat.

I’ll be honest; I still don’t think we’ll do it. There are too many things that can go wrong, but some of them have to go wrong in a bigger way than they ever have before for us to lose to teams in this league. But bad officiating, bad luck on the injury front and an extended run in Europe all add the X factor … these little unknowns can result in that weird confluence of circumstances which deny us another place in the history books.

But an injury crisis, I figure we could cope with now. Bad day at the office? A lot more likely when you can’t take five good players off the pitch and put another five on to change the game. Fatigue? Not with our rotation policies. That leaves the men in black and their dark influence on events; even that hasn’t proved to be an impediment so far.

That’s why this isn’t just a left-field idea, even in November, and whilst, as I said, I have my doubts that we’ll make it that’s based just on an understanding that football seasons are long and difficult at the best of times and that it only takes one slip to end that dream … but I honestly look at the fixture list and wonder where it’s coming. Realistically, there’s no real obstacle in the way of this. We could definitely do it.

And this is why I’m feeling real good tonight after watching that storming display. We’ve not only won this game today but we’ve done it with a rotated team and done it with such panache that it’s fair to dream and to dream big. That we can watch a display like the one Luke McCowan turned in and still wonder if he’ll start on Wednesday night indicates how strong we are and how tough the challenge for any team trying to stop us is.

What a fantastic place for this team to be.