Hope is kindled as Celtic finally delivers the statement we’ve waited for.

Yesterday, we did something we haven’t done in a while. We played free-flowing football. We scored a whack of goals in a very short space of time, and in that time we looked lethal. Even Celtic’s fussiest critics had to come out and say that, in that spell, we looked like the Celtic of old.

One of the most fulsome in his praise was Tom English, who seemed honestly gobsmacked.

And gobsmacked is probably the fairest description of how most of us felt. Not just the fans, but the watching commentariat too. I spent a bit of time online last night talking to people and taking the temperature, just to see if their reactions matched my own.

Over and over again, the same kind of words came back. The same words I had written yesterday. The same words I had said in conversations with friends. That was nuts. That was almost unbelievable.

We have seen so many twists and turns in this race, so many weird and freakish occurrences, and this might turn out to be another one of them.

It might be nothing more than a brief moment where all the planets aligned and our Celtic team got luckier than we have at any other point this season. Every pass found a man. Every shot ended up in the net.

But it did not feel like that while watching it.

It did not feel like luck.

There is a great moment in The Fellowship of the Ring when the Fellowship is sailing down the Anduin and they come to the Argonath, the great twin statues of the ancient kings of Gondor. They stand hundreds of feet high, impossible to imagine, impossible to believe that anyone could ever have built them.

Frodo is in the boat with Strider, who he now knows as Aragorn. He has spent months on the road with this man. He has heard all manner of tales, but he knows only what he has seen. This is a bold warrior, yes, but surely no more than that.

Then, for a moment, he hears Aragorn exhale. Frodo turns, and the man in the boat with him is the same man but utterly different. Everything about him has changed. His posture. His face. Even his eyes and his voice when he speaks.

This is no longer Strider, the strange wanderer in distant lands.

This is Aragorn, son of Arathorn, the king of Gondor.

Yesterday, in those few minutes, we saw something similar with Celtic.

We saw the difference between this pale shadow of a football team and the force that swept aside the opposition last season to score over 100 goals and secure almost 100 points. It was the same Celtic team, with much the same personnel we have been watching all season, but utterly different.

And you felt it as you watched them, just as Frodo must have felt it turning in that boat to see the proud, determined face of an exiled monarch returning at last to the land he was born to rule.

What does it mean?

Maybe nothing.

There were plenty of serious obstacles standing between Aragorn and the crown, and there are still one or two obstacles in Celtic’s way. There are still one or two armies of darkness to swat aside before we get where we want to go.

But all of us who have spent the past few months knowing this was in us, while no longer quite believing we would actually see it, were shocked yesterday in the best possible way.

At the end of the 90 minutes, I was as angry as I have been all season. I thought the second half had been a humiliation, an embarrassment on a level almost beyond anything we had seen so far. Yet by the time we scored the third goal in extra time, I was laughing my head off in absolute amazement and pleasure at what I was watching.

Yes, it is still a tough road. It was always going to be a tough road. There are still reasons to be nervous, and it is perfectly reasonable to feel that way.

But is it finally permissible to feel hope again? Is it permissible to think that maybe there is still something more here than an outside chance that everything goes right?

Because there is a difference between knowing that performance is in there and actually watching it come out.

There is a difference between knowing it intellectually and feeling it in your gut.

There is a difference between imagining what it might look like in your head and watching the live, real-life version unfold in front of you.

And if we felt it, perhaps the Celtic players did too.

Perhaps they looked at each other and, for the first time in a while, saw champions. Perhaps they saw players they believed in again and just maybe they saw confidence in one another’s faces, and those players looked back at them with the same thought.

Because, God damn it, isn’t that what we always mean when we talk about a statement victory? A game that reminds everybody how good we can be. A game that restores a kind of shared belief, not just in the stands, but among the players too.

All season long, we have been waiting for it. We have been waiting for that single performance, no matter how it arrived, no matter who it came against, that reminds this Celtic team of what it is capable of. Perhaps that is what we just watched.

A lot of statement victories do not unfold across a full 90 minutes. Sometimes the goals come in bursts. Sometimes they arrive in quick succession. That does not make it less impressive. It does not make it less of a statement.

So yes, it went to extra time. Yes, the second half was embarrassingly bad. Yes, there are still concerns. Serious ones.

But when everything is said and done, we got it done. We delivered the statement after all. We can take heart from that. The team can take heart from that. They can draw confidence from it and, hopefully, carry it into the next game.

So yes, that performance refired something. A spark has been lit. Like the beacons of Gondor in The Return of the King, hope is kindled.

Maybe this is the moment we have been waiting for.

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