“Greater than zero.” The phrase that condemns the anti-Celtic media.

Last night, in my downtime from Celtic work, I was listening to The Bulwark while working on something else. They were having a discussion about Donald Trump, the succession crisis inside the Republican Party and who might carry the MAGA torch after him.

The most interesting part of it came from Jonathan V. Last, or JVL, who is one of the sharpest political commentators in America. He has a habit of saying things that sound too strange to be true, only for events to turn around later and prove that he was staring right at the thing everyone else had missed.

His latest argument was that Donald Trump Jr might be the person best placed to inherit MAGA. Not because he is brilliant. Not because he has some unique political gift. But because he has the name, the brand recognition, the trust of the family and enough connection with the base to carry the thing forward without appearing to dilute it.

That was interesting enough. But the more revealing part came before they even got to that. Because first they had to deal with the obvious question: what does Donald Trump himself do?

The assumption, of course, is that MAGA will need a successor because Trump cannot legally run for a third term. The Constitution bars him from doing so. That should be the end of the matter. In a sane world, it would be.

But Tim Miller made the point that there is still a greater than zero per cent chance that Trump tries it anyway. Greater than zero.

That phrase stuck with me.

Here we have serious political commentators discussing the possibility that a sitting American president might attempt one of the most outrageous, unconstitutional manoeuvres in modern American history, and they cannot honestly say the chance is zero.

It should be zero. It ought to be zero. In a functioning democracy, it would be zero.

But it is not.

And that made me think;

“That’s a greater chance than Hugh Keevins thinks we have of winning the league!”

Paulina’s piece yesterday scorned him for his own eerily similar phrase.

Because Hugh Keevins, a man allegedly paid to comment seriously on football, has looked at Celtic sitting three points off the top of the table with five games to go, with both of our rivals still to come to Celtic Park, and has concluded that our chance of winning the league is zero per cent.

Not slim. Not unlikely nor even extremely difficult. Zero.

So let me get this straight.

The percentage chance of Donald Trump attempting to bulldoze the United States Constitution and run for a third term is, in the eyes of serious political commentators, greater than zero. But Celtic winning a title from three points back, with five games left and two home fixtures against the teams above us, is zero?

That is where we are now and I genuinely do not know which part of that is more absurd.

In fairness to JVL and Miller, I at least know what they mean.

Trump has already tried to stop a count he was losing. He has already shown contempt for the rules when the rules do not give him what he wants. If anyone alive in American politics might try the unthinkable, it is him. Their point is not that it is likely. Their point is that only a fool would call it impossible.

Keevins, on the other hand, has no such defence. He says our title win is impossible. Not unlikely. That’s not zero percent. Impossible.

And as Paulina says, his claim is simply ridiculous. What the Trump comparison does is frame it that way in a manner that nobody can ignore.

A team three points off the top with five games left, who still have to play both teams above them, obviously has more than a zero per cent chance. You do not need a supercomputer for that. Nor do you need Opta or whoever Football Rankings are to tell you that. You do not need a data model or a probability engine or a panel of analysts sitting in a dark room feeding results into the machine.

You need only the league table and a working brain.

Even the supercomputer I wrote about last night gave Celtic something like a 20 per cent chance. I think that number is questionable because any model built on this season’s data has a fairly large Wilfried Nancy-shaped hole in its assumptions. But even that model, with all its flaws, could not bring itself to say zero as Keevins did.

And if it was just Keevins, I probably would not bother.

Paulina has, after all, written a perfectly good story on that subject.

Keevins is known to us all. He has made a long career out of pronouncing Celtic doomed in tones that suggest he has just discovered fire. He is easy to dismiss because he has spent years making himself easy to dismiss.

But this is not just Keevins. The broader media mood is almost as strange. The idea that Celtic cannot win this title, that it is beyond our abilities, that we are almost certain to finish third, is now close to the mainstream consensus. It makes headlines when anyone contradicts it, as Scott Brown did the other day.

The reaction is not, “interesting, let’s hear the argument.” It is more like, “away and lie down, come back when you are serious.”

That is what I find so bizarre.

We are talking about the four-in-a-row champions. We are talking about a club that has reached both domestic cup finals. This is a side that got through the European group stage. We are talking about a team that, despite a season of chaos, is three points off the top with five games to play.

And still, we are being written off as though this is already over.

By Celtic’s standards, we have been poor. I have said that repeatedly, and nothing about the weekend changes it.

We have been disjointed, frustrating, slow, predictable and, at times, almost unwatchable. Enormous mistakes have been made at every level of the club. The summer will be a nightmare if the people in charge do not get serious.

But by anyone else’s standards, this campaign would be considered almost miraculous, and on the edge of being phenomenally successful.

That is the contradiction the media does not want to sit with.

Celtic are underperforming badly compared with Celtic of old. But compared with the sides around us, we are still close enough to terrify them.

We are still alive and dangerous. We are still capable of making this season look very different by the time the final whistle blows.

The media keeps talking as though our lack of goals is some fatal problem. Yet before the Ibrox club scored six at Falkirk, they were only one league goal ahead of us. Hearts, with all the praise their forward line gets, are behind us in the goals scored column.

The real gap is not between Celtic and the teams around us. The real gap is between this Celtic team and last season’s Celtic team.

That matters, but it is not the same argument.

Likewise, people keep saying there is no form to suggest we can do it. But we are three points off the top. We just scored four goals in six minutes in a cup semi-final. We have both rivals still to come to Celtic Park. Celtic have players who have won this league before. We have a manager who has been over the course. We have, at the very least, a puncher’s chance.

And a puncher’s chance is not zero.

Maybe that is what lies underneath all of this. Maybe the certainty is not analysis at all but a weird kind of denial.

See, in the States it is right to discuss Trump’s “greater than zero” chance of doing something dangerous, because he’s proved he’s a dangerous guy. But there is no apparent logic in denying that Celtic still has a very real chance … except that maybe no-one can face up to that without asking themselves a hard question.

Because if this damaged, chaotic, compromised Celtic side still wins the title, then Scottish football has to look at itself and ask that very uncomfortable question; what does it say about the rest of the league?

More specifically, what does it say about Hearts if they had that lead and still could not finish the job? What does it say about the Ibrox club if they had all that hype, all that momentum, all that media noise behind them, and still ended up behind a Celtic team everyone basically agreed was completely broken?

Here’s another one, and this is a big one; what does it say about the pundits who buried us before the football was done?

Maybe that is why “zero per cent” is so attractive to them.

If Celtic have no chance, then nobody has to think about what it would mean if we won. Nobody has to imagine the consequences or deal with the possibility that even in a season where we have made almost every mistake available to us, we might still be better than everyone else.

But that possibility exists. It is greater than zero.

This weekend, the picture may change again. The league table may tighten. The pressure may shift. The supercomputer may suddenly discover a new set of probabilities and quietly adjust its verdict, as these things always do.

Nobody knows how this ends. Keevins does not know. The supercomputer does not know. The media does not know. I do not know.

But I know this much: Celtic are not dead. Celtic are not out. Celtic are not some mathematical ghost drifting around the edge of the title race. We are alive. We are close.

And if that six-minute burst at Hampden was more than a freak moment, if it was the first sign of something returning, then everyone who declared this over may soon wish they had left themselves a little room for doubt.

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