Celtic has a chance to exorcise the ghosts of Fir Park once and for all.

Celtic is all about the future. Celtic has always been about the future, at least in terms of the trajectory of the club and the arc of our history. Our board of directors may not know how to get out of the past, but this club has always looked forward rather than back.

That does not mean there is no value in looking back. Of course there is. You respect your history. You honour it, as we have always done. But you should always be thinking about what comes next, and carrying the best of that history forward. One of the problems with certain other clubs is that they do not do that. They live permanently in the past.

The past, both good and bad, has positives and negatives. It has lessons to aspire to and lessons to avoid. But I am not scared of the past, and most people at Celtic are not scared of it either. Most players and managers who have come through the gates over the years have not been scared of the past. The media is very good at using it as a cudgel to try to beat us with. They are just not very effective at it.

They are talking about parallels right now, and parallels are fun. They are interesting to examine. But they do not have any real bearing on the future. They do not tell us what is going to happen. In the piece I wrote this morning about Ibrox’s addiction to spending money, gambling, and the Danny Röhl doubling-down exercise, I talked about one of the principles of that kind of bet.

The coin has no memory.

The odds remain 50-50 no matter how many times you spin it or what results you have already had. There are only two ways the coin can land, heads or tails, and the coin does not care that it has landed one way fifteen times in a row.

That is the same with football history. The team of today is not the team of yesterday. The team of yesterday is not the team of ten years ago. We do not need to be haunted by the past. If there is a negative record out there, you approach it from the point of view that it is there to be beaten. If there is a place that haunts your nightmares, the best thing you can do is go there and forge a dream scenario.

For a lot of our supporters, any game at Fir Park carries negative connotations. Fir Park was the scene of one of the darkest moments many of us can remember as Celtic fans. I remember exactly where I was when Scott McDonald scored those goals. I remember exactly how it felt to go to the last day, needing to finish the job, and then lose it at Motherwell when we had one hand on the title and were as good as champions.

It will never be removed from my memory. That is why, when all the conversations were happening about title stripping, I wanted titles stripped, but I was never comfortable with the idea that we might be awarded them instead. How do you take an award from that day?

That day haunts us. All of us. It will forever be in our memories. It would not have mattered had that title been handed to us retrospectively. It would have been no less nightmarish to remember.

There is no way the events of that day will ever leave those of us unlucky enough to witness them. But they should not haunt us anymore. The ghosts of that day were exorcised a long time ago.

We have gone to Motherwell for big matches and won. Motherwell is not a ground to fear just because something bad happened there once. We have had bad days at Hampden, but we do not get spooked every time we walk through those gates. We have had bad days at Ibrox, but that place holds no fear for us.

Are there parallels? Yes. But there are not as many as some people think. There are not as many as some people say. Hearts are not playing at Dens Park on the final day. We are not playing at Love Street. This is not the final day. This is not the last game. It is the second-last game.

The league will not be decided tonight unless Celtic lose and Hearts win. The last time this happened, we lost it to the Ibrox club. This time, if it goes wrong, it will not be the Ibrox club. So yes, there are parallels. But we are not carrying the baggage of that day any longer.

How many titles have there been since then? How many major honours?

Fir Park is just another ground. Motherwell are just another team.

I remember losing to Hibs at home that year and having the sinking feeling that this was the one that screwed everything up. Although we won the next two, we did not go into that Motherwell game feeling anything less than nervous. I think we are less nervous about tonight than we were that afternoon.

And I know Martin O’Neill himself regards that day as one of the great pieces of unresolved business of his career. Celtic’s 2004/05 title was lost in the closing minutes at Motherwell, when Scott McDonald scored twice and the title went elsewhere by a single point.

He does have a ghost to exorcise tonight. He does have a monkey to get off his back. That is one of the reasons why this game is so compelling. But it does not have the weight of history attached to it that some in the media would have you believe.

There are two ways this can go. It can be an echo. Or it can be an exorcism.

It is time all of us put that day behind us once and for all. What a night this would be to do it.

Just as the coin has no memory, Fir Park has no memory.

It is history. It is not the future.

Tonight, Celtic can finally consign it to the place where it belongs.

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