13 years on, Ibrox still lives in the shadow of the Celtic fans happiest Valentine.

For an entire generation of our fans, Valentine’s Day will never be remembered for the wives, husbands, the girlfriends, boyfriends or whatever we call the partners upon whom we poured our love and affection.

Oh, don’t get me wrong—I’ve had some nice Valentine’s Days out with the woman at the centre of my life at that particular time. But one person will forever be enshrined in memory and make 14 February special.

And it is to that person that I dedicated my lunch and a beer this afternoon. The one I drank a toast to was none other than Craig Thomas Whyte—Celtic Land’s happiest Valentine, and the source of the worst memory of this day that any Ibrox fan has ever had or ever will have in all of their miserable lives.

I still get a kick out of this. A kick out of how many nights out were ruined, how many special days will never be the same again. How many men and women sat across the table from a depressed and gloomy partner who had been expecting a night of romance and were instead treated to a long, boring, horrific, hate-filled rant about what a bastard Whyte was and how devastated they felt for their club.

I suspect relationships and marriages ended there and then. I’ve always tried to imagine one of those scenarios: a candlelit dinner, long planned, long anticipated, and ruined by Craig Whyte’s doorstep announcement the day before—that Rangers would go into administration on Valentine’s Day.

Let’s not forget—the day we all remember wasn’t actually 14 February at all. That was the 13th of February. This is the anniversary of the day their administration was formalised. That doesn’t make today any less painful for their supporters. That doesn’t make it any less joyous for us.

Today is the one we celebrate because today is when the blindfolds came off, the blinkers were removed, and the consequences of decades of overspending and cheating the taxman came home to roost in a big way. 13 February 2012 was the detonation. This was the day when the shockwave hit.

It’s been 13 years since that day.

Look at what has followed. Celtic has won the treble five times. There have been a bunch of doubles along the way. In the time between Craig Whyte making that announcement and the present day, those supporters who gathered outside Ibrox to protest and who hoped it would be a momentary crisis soon resolved have seen a grand total of three trophies come their way. Three in all those years.

And let’s not forget—that’s only the silverware count. The actual consequences of that day were much more severe.

Because who would have believed that 13 years down the line they would be following a brand-new club? The one they protested on behalf of was put on death watch that very day, and it didn’t last much longer.

By the end of that campaign, it was obvious what was going to happen, even if The Daily Record and other organs of Scottish sports journalism continued to spin fairy tales that everything might be all right, that HMRC would accept a CVA of pennies in the pound, and that all manner of heroic saviours were lining up to pour their money in as Fergus had once done at Celtic.

None of it came to pass. The club entered administration and, from there, liquidation. They went out of business. We all know this is true. The hilarity that followed, amidst all the chaos and confusion, should never be forgotten—and it should never be allowed to be forgotten or ignored by those in the media who would choose to do so, who would choose to obfuscate, twist words, and pretend it was otherwise.

Thirteen years have elapsed since the administration of Rangers, but the administration itself was set in motion over a decade before that.

Every triumph their fans celebrated in that time, every one they now look back on fondly as the “halcyon days,” has been tainted forever by the knowledge of what it wrought. Because all that living high on someone else’s money came at an enormous cost. All that running up debts, all that running from reality, had huge and devastating effects.

There’s a statue outside their stadium of Walter Smith. Other than David Murray, I can’t think of a single person who played a bigger part in the downfall of the Ibrox club than he did. He’s hailed as a hero and a legend.

But he was in the manager’s office for three years in which the club could have cut the wage bill, slashed its costs, sold off every key player it had to raise as much money as possible in the quickest time to get the HMRC debt off their backs.

The cost base was huge because he kept it that way. And his nomination of Ally McCoist as his successor was one of the most cataclysmic events in the club’s history—because it was his twin European exits that finally brought down the hammer.

People blamed Craig Whyte, but Craig Whyte was only a fly-by-night chancer who saw exactly what Rangers was: a distressed business, a failing business. And he saw an opportunity to come in, take over, send them to the wall, and emerge on the other side with a clean bill of health and no significant debt, after which he planned to float them on the stock exchange, and gullible Ibrox fans—buoyed by the idea that they would never again see their club risked by spivs and chancers—would them buy in droves.

On paper, anyway, it was a sound and sensible plan.

Quite a lot went wrong with it, and right from the start. Celtic fans online had sussed who Whyte was and what he was up to before he’d even handed over his shiny £1 coin to get the club out of Murray’s hands. Once the takeover was complete he failed to anticipate the European knockouts which saw him pile up additional debts he’d never intended, which in part led to HMRC taking such a hard line.

He never anticipated the reaction of the clubs to the very idea that a phoenix version of Rangers would go straight into the top flight.

He didn’t recognise that Charles Green—who had been working with him the whole time and was supposed to be his frontman when he retook control of the club—would see an opportunity to spring an elaborate con on him.

There are so many books yet to be written about this. So many threads to this story that it’s hard to know which one to pull if you want to get a complete picture.

But we can at least take stock of where we’ve ended up.

With Celtic as the undisputed football superpower in Scotland, and the new club their fans follow a floundering, enfeebled joke.

I’ve lost count of the many things whose roots we cannot trace and whose origins will forever remain shrouded in mystery and doubt. But the one thing we can say with absolute certainty—an absolute fact—is that 13 years ago, the ramparts crashed, the bastions crumbled, and the great tower, with its all-seeing eye, disintegrated into dust.

The institution David Murray once called “the second biggest in Scotland after the church” fell that day. And it fell completely and utterly, never to rise again.

We did not know at the time that we were watching what I talked about last night when I referred to the “before and after.” But the lives of all Ibrox fans are neatly divided by that single moment when Jim White broke into a news story on Sky Sports to tell the world that paperwork for administration had been filed, and that Rangers would voluntarily enter administration the following day—14 February 2012.

It is the ultimate expression of before this and after this—the ultimate symbol of how that line can be crossed in a moment and leave nothing the same ever again. That’s why so many of us, when we talk about Scottish football, speak in terms of post-2012. For their fans there is only “before it” and “after it.”

And that is why today, many of us pay tribute to Craig Whyte and commemorate that momentous, wondrous event.

Happy Valentine’s Day, fellow fans.

Happy Administration Day.

Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images