John McGinn to Celtic? That day has gone. It’s Miller time.

I was very interested yesterday to read John McGinn’s comments about how he would never say never to the possibility of one day signing for Celtic.

He’s like a lot of players who, as they get into their 30s, start looking back instead of looking forward. And it always amuses me when people do this because it sounds like they think they’d be doing you a favour.

But the John McGinn saga is over.

It was over the day he signed for Aston Villa. There’s been plenty of discussion about this stuff since then, and there are lessons we should have learned from that series of events. But one thing that definitely can’t come out of it is rolling back the clock.

There are clubs that live in the past, and there are fanbases that seem to permanently exist there. If you go onto one of the Ibrox fan forums right now, you’ll find a lot of them indulging in this kind of talk. Many are sitting watching old YouTube clips of their so-called glory sides from before the liquidation of their first club, reminding themselves what it was like to see a team that consistently won things.

It’s quaint, sad, and tragic. None of them seems to recognise that the years they think of as the “glory days” were the very years that got them into the trouble that flushed their old club down the pan. Honestly, if it were me, I don’t think I could watch those videos without feeling a little sick—not just because all that wallowing in the past does nothing for me, but because I’d know exactly where that path ended: in the graveyard.

We have our past glories, and we’re rightly proud of them.

There’s nothing wrong with sticking on the DVD of the European Cup final and reliving the greatest day in our history.

But that’s not the same thing. That’s not retreating into the past because you don’t like the present or can’t bear to think about the future. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of nostalgia. It only becomes weird when it’s used as a comfort blanket.

I don’t tend to think too much about players who used to be here and are now gone. I don’t think about players we should have signed but didn’t. There are so many of them, and missed opportunities happen all the time.

Some people still talk about Ivan Toney and the like, but honestly, I couldn’t care less. I look at what we’ve done since missing out on those guys and ask myself if life would have been better had we gotten them? I don’t think we’ve done too badly without them.

To be honest, I’m too busy enjoying the present and looking forward to the future to worry about the past. So, when I hear talk about Kieran Tierney coming back or John McGinn pulling on the Celtic strip one day, it leaves me cold.

Tierney was here and chose to leave.

McGinn had his chance to sign and chose not to.

That’s all I need to know.

What makes the McGinn story particularly amusing right now is that it’s landed just as we’re debating whether or not to go all in for Lennon Miller, the best young player in the country at the moment. If we’ve learned anything from the McGinn saga, it’s that you act when the opportunity is there. You get these players before the Premier League clubs start sniffing around.

You act while there’s money in the bank and a manager ready to spend it. You don’t drag your feet, as we did with McGinn. You go and get your man.

Maybe McGinn regrets not choosing Celtic when he had the chance. He says he’s sick of talking about it and claims there’s a lot out there that’s far from accurate.

But I do know our CEO at the time sat with him and his family, expecting him to sign. I’ve always blamed Lawwell for mishandling the situation, but McGinn wasn’t blameless either. That failure was one of the reasons Brendan Rodgers left. Now Rodgers is back, running the show, and forward planning is finally a priority again.

This McGinn talk is a distraction when the real discussion should be about Lennon Miller. Going for Miller means looking to the future, building the best young midfield possible. Going for a 31-year-old McGinn—whether on a free transfer or not—would be a step backwards. If it means a talent like Miller slips through our fingers, it would be a colossal waste of time and money.

So I’d just as soon end that talk right now.

Put it in the regrets column, put it in the “one we missed out on” column, put it wherever you want. Just don’t project it into our future because it’s not part of our future.

It’s certainly not part of our future while the previous CEO is chairman and while the manager who was there at the time is the manager now, because I don’t see either of those two agreeing to any scenario where it’s like the return of a long-lost son. They both felt let down by that whole affair, and they’re both entitled, in my view, to still be a little bit ticked off.

Because although I think mistakes were made, we weren’t the only ones who made them.

There may have been a little arrogance evident, but our intentions were good. And it wasn’t for nothing that we believed a deal could be done.

In the end, he made the decision that was right for him, and we haven’t exactly been suffering for our failure to get him through all these years.

We went on to win a bunch of silverware and we continue to pile it up. So, in the end, no harm done.

He got to go away and earn more money than he could ever have earned at Celtic, and he got the cash to add to his League Cup at St Mirren and his Scottish Cup with Hibs.

Every choice comes with a compromise. I’m pretty pleased with what we got.