The magic should not blind folk to the hard yards Celtic put in to get here.

Earlier I said that it was a nearly perfect campaign; I described it as a total triumph. That’s the league, of course; we’re not going to know if we’ve cleared that hurdle all the way until next weekend when we contest the cup final. But a special league campaign needed a special ending. We got our fairy-tale finish.

On the day James Forrest was being honoured – and how he has deserved it over the years – we were trailing going into the last moments of the game. We all wanted the goal, of course, but that Forrest himself should score it, ending the weeks of “will he/won’t he?” and settling the matter in a moment whilst giving us all the lift after a dreary afternoon to enjoy the party on a high … no script writer would have dared write that.

But we don’t need script writers to conjure magic. We are Celtic. Magic is part of the club. It is part of the DNA. Of course we’d be chasing late in the last game. Of course Forrest would see the countdown clock ticking inexorably away, leaving him only a cup final shot left, with all the attendant pressures that come with that. Of course we’d be heading for that rarest of things; a home defeat. And on Trophy Day at that.

Was there the slightest doubt that Forrest would pop up? Not in my mind, but then I’m an avid reader of books where the deux ex machina is a part of the art form. Even Stephen King, who counsels against them in On Writing, loves them; The Hand of God literally comes down from Heaven at the end of The Stand to deliver glorious justice on behalf of the Boulder Free Zone. I always expect a miracle ending.

And today that was perfect. That was the form elevated to the art. That was beautiful. That was a moment of genuine wonderment and joy … and that weirdest, and perhaps greatest kind of joy, that one that reminds you that this is a joint endeavor. This was the fans celebrating us, celebrating the club … but at the same time an outpouring of joy on behalf of a specific individual. To have the whole stadium feel that way about someone else shows we’ve not yet diverted down into IPhone otherness.

No-one would say its the start of something today; it has that feeling of “end of an era” about it and that is not a bad thing when you consider the “third year is the killer” rule we’ve talked about here before. Managers who want to win that third title have to change things up; sometimes that’s the team, sometimes it’s the tactics. The great managers will shake up both at this moment. Some things about this team seem stale and samey: nobody questions the ability to make magic, to pull the miracle as though conjured up as the ghost from the machine. But you don’t ignore warning signs unlesss you are very silly or very arrogant and I hope we don’t have any of either here.

These days are special. They used to be special because they were rare. I would stipulate that they are special now primarily because they are no longer rare. This feels like a long period where we’re getting our rewards for years of doing the right things, for years of making the right decisions, years in which we have sometimes suffered but always in that greater cause, the cause of the club we love.

In short, they are special, I think, because this feels earned.

This is not success paid for by some giant corporation where the smartest thing you did was trade away your identity and your soul for a few quid or the promise of jam tomorrow: during the Fergus revolution there were times when there was no jam and not the promise of it either except far off in the distance if we had directors who continued to do things as he had. In short, we were promised jam but only when we’d built acres of greenhouses, only when we’d cultivated our crops, only when there were plenty of berries and only when we’d built the processing plant to turn them into the stuff.

None of it was easy. Even after Fergus had secured that elusive title – and an important one at that – and left this game behind we had to endure more suffering; we had to endure more big talk from Murray, more of his moonbeams, more of his bringing in “top managers” and throwing money at them. This didn’t end the day the man with the bunnet waltzed into town and it didn’t even end on the day he walked out the door.

If there was a perfect recipe we hadn’t found it yet. It would time a while. It would take longer. But once we had it down cold we started to eat away at that trophy lead they claimed and after a point pulling away was assured. But in between times we had to suffer. Yet foundations were being laid and those would wash our suffering away.

That wasn’t a celebration of a single season, nor even a single player and he deserved every bit of the adulation that came his way this afternoon, and I’ll do something on that subject tomorrow.

This was about bigger things than that. It was about where we are as a club and in this great big Celtic Family of ours. We might not always agree on the road we’re taking but I hope we can at least agree on the destination. As good as things are here, there’s always better to come, and that’s what we are looking towards.