Today we celebrate Celtic. The rest of the world is not invited.

This morning’s first article was, as far as my feelings about our title challengers go, quite possibly my final word on the events of the last seven days. As of now, they do not matter. Because today is about Celtic.

The media has spent its time taking shots at us. It has had its week of fun and shame. But no one is taking the title we won. No one is taking the glory from us. And just as no one is taking that, no one is taking today either.

Last weekend was stressful. That’s why, when I came on the podcast on Monday night, I felt a deep sense of relief. I was still not quite sure I believed what had happened. Because of the events of the week, I didn’t really get a chance to start processing how enormous last weekend was for Celtic until last night.

But it was enormous. It was game-changing.

Oddly, our opponents processed it faster than many of us did, and that explains their rabid behaviour all the way through the last seven days.

We went from the possibility of a third-place finish, staring disaster in the face, to winning the title. It was not just another league championship. It was not just another major honour. This season has not been brilliant. We have suffered an unbelievable amount, needlessly in my view. But it could have been so much worse.

The consequences of a third-place finish would have been dreadful beyond measure, especially if the Ibrox club had finished champions and collected that Champions League money.

The fact that we are champions gives us a more solid foundation for the summer. Whoever the manager is going to be, that announcement has to be made soon, because the work in front of us is enormous.

But for today, for right now, I intend to enjoy it.

I don’t intend to let it stress me in any way. That was last week. Today is all about us.

Today is all about Celtic.

Today is not a stressful end to a long and arduous campaign. It is a celebration. Our fans will go to Hampden today as league champions chasing a double. There will be a carnival atmosphere. It will be a party.

Yes, there is a serious job still to be done.

But the vibe around the game has been transformed. It could have been a mournful occasion, albeit one built around honouring one man. It will be built around honouring him, but the atmosphere will be much less sombre.

The hard work of the rebuild can come tomorrow. The reckoning with the board, and it must come, can come tomorrow too. The fuller examination of the consequences for other clubs can come tomorrow as well.

If you feel like we have not had a chance to breathe in the last seven days, you are not wrong. It has been one thing after another. One attack after another.

Today, it all drifts away on the wind. Today is about this support, this team and this manager. Nothing else gets to intrude on that.

This will be Celtic at its best: one great big Hampden party. We deserve it. We have earned it. We have earned everything we have got, and everything we have ever had.

We may be the biggest club in the land, but we are still the club of the underdog. We are still the club of the poor, the downtrodden and the dispossessed. The club of the immigrant. The club of the working man. We are a club that is both Irish and Scottish, and proud of both those identities.

The hateful bastards who have been attacking us all week will not be allowed to spoil this moment with their poisoned, jaundiced view of who and what we are. We know who and what we are. That’s why we march to Hampden today with pride.

At the centre of all of this, of course, is Martin O’Neill.

He gets his own article after the game, win or lose. That article will not change. The debt we owe him is enormous and will not change. The credit he deserves for what he has led us to will not change.

I have a very definite hope for what he does next, but whatever choice he makes, he will have our support and our gratitude.

This is his finest hour.

Although this day was booked well in advance, the idea that we would be coming here as champions was not something many of us allowed ourselves to think too much about. Most people were glad that O’Neill would have this moment, this swan song, this chance to depart with another major honour.

As it turns out, he is set up to depart with two if in fact he’s departing at all.

It should really be three. That is down to the people in charge of our club and yet another of their calamitous errors of judgement. But Martin will not care about that today.

This is probably a day beyond his wildest imaginings. The kind of day he could only have dreamed about and never, ever thought he would see.

It is a day none of us thought we would see.

Last weekend exorcised the ghosts of 2005 once and for all. Today is just icing on the cake. But if Martin walks around Hampden this afternoon with the Scottish Cup in his hands, it will complete one of the most astonishing stories in the history of the Scottish game.

That is what makes the absurdity of this week, the idiocy, the lies, the smears and the attacks, so ridiculous. These people were looking for a fairy tale and are enraged they didn’t get it; all the while, there was one right on their doorstep all this time.

Celtic is itself a fairy tale. This season has proved it. But Martin O’Neill … man oh man.

It takes incredible bitterness for so-called neutrals not to recognise the magnitude of what we did in these last seven games. It is no less a story than the one they were hoping for at Hearts. It is no less beautiful to those who love the game.

A club that was on its knees, dragged kicking and screaming back to life by a manager in his seventies who thought he had seen the last of his glory days, and whose previous final shot at glory had ended so horribly.

If you can’t see the romance in that, then you are dead inside. Unless you are just the kind of bitter bastard who does not want to see it.

But the fairy tale was real whether you saw it or not.

So today is about us. Today is all about us.

Today is a celebration not only of the success we have won, but of all the successes we can hope for in times to come. This club has something special, and that something is us. It is the strength we have together when we come together and give the team our full support.

Today is about Martin, who deserves this like no manager in Scottish football ever has. He may not have been the media darling. He may not have been named Manager of the Year.

But he was the manager of the year. He is the manager of the year.

Derek McInnes can look at his little gongs, which are worth about as much as Keith Jackson’s journalism awards. They are a measure of how backward this game is that it did not wait to honour the man who deserves it most.

Today is about the team too.

For those who are staying and those who are going. For those who will be part of the next evolution, and those who will move on. It is not for nothing that I talked about The Last Dance. If this is to be the last dance, then all those players will go with our best wishes and solemn gratitude.

When it mattered, when the chips were down, when duty called and the moment required them, they rose to the challenge. They performed. They triumphed. They, too, have earned their bow in front of the Celtic fans one last time.

This should be a beautiful day.

This should be a party. The party we didn’t quite get to have at Celtic Park. Not because the media made it impossible. Not because we did not want it. But because the stress of the day and the emotion of the occasion were just too damned great.

I’ve spoken to people who, like me, just felt shell-shocked. In a good way, sure. But shell-shocked all the same. Only now have many of us begun to process the enormity of what we went through. All that tension is behind us now.

The league table does not lie. We are champions.

We are worthy champions.

Today, we celebrate that. Hopefully, we also celebrate another major honour won. Then we say goodbye to some of the people who made it happen, and start building for the next challenge. The next campaign.

The next league title.

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