This Celtic squad gets ready for its Last Dance.

Regular readers will know that I have a great deal of reverence for one of the finest sports documentaries ever made: The Last Dance, which is about the final season of the Chicago Bulls super team and its attempt to win its second third title in a row.

The parallels between what happened there and what has happened at Celtic this season should be obvious to everyone who has watched it.

The story opens with the Bulls having won their second title of that run. They had been three-time winners a few years before, at which point Michael Jordan decided he was going to step away from the club and the game. The team quickly fell back into the pack, and it was only when Jordan decided to return that everything clicked into place again.

The two titles that followed were among the best the Bulls had ever won. Jordan proved to himself and to the rest of the world that not only did he still have it, but that he remained the greatest player of all time.

At the end of that second season, they were entitled to believe they were in the process of building a dynasty even greater than the first three-title team.

It wasn’t to be.

For reasons which are never made entirely clear in the documentary, general manager Jerry Krause made the decision to break the team up. He told the esteemed coach Phil Jackson that he would not get a new contract. He told Jordan that he would be allowed to leave. Scottie Pippen, the other great linchpin of the team, was also told that he could go.

This infuriated all three, because they believed that the only way the title should be taken away from them was if they lost it on the court, not because someone in an office had decided to restructure the side.

Krause summed up his decision with a piece of breathtaking arrogance which could have come straight out of the Celtic boardroom.

“Players and coaches do not win titles. Organisations do.”

Everyone involved in the Bulls coaching and playing staff saw that as a calculated insult.

Nevertheless, they refused to down tools. They believed they were the best team in the world. They believed they had earned the right to call themselves that. They were not going to give up that title because someone upstairs had decided the story was over.

So they made that season special.

If it was to be their swansong campaign, they were going to go out showing the world why they were the best, and why the entire strategy of rebuilding was nonsense.

Phil Jackson got the team together for their summer training camp and delivered them a binder with the plan for that season.

He called it The Last Dance.

It hardly needs pointing out that although we have megalomaniacs in charge of this club who have no business running such an operation, it should have been Brendan Rodgers getting the opportunity to sign off from Celtic with a major success.

I have no doubt, none whatsoever, in spite of his numerous critics, that he would have done just that. Rodgers would have delivered a double at least, and probably another treble.

But just as Jerry Krause knew better than Phil Jackson and his team, our board knew better than Brendan Rodgers.

They second-guessed Rodgers. They undercut him. They finally forced him out of the club.

Nevertheless, you can tell the players still want to do this. It has been left to Martin O’Neill to provide the Last Dance blueprint, because although Rodgers was probably going to leave at the end of the season, we also know that a lot of these guys were going to go with him.

Daizen Maeda will almost certainly leave. Reo Hatate will almost certainly leave. There will be a bid for Arne Engels which the club will not stand in the way of. There is talk of interest from Italy in Auston Trusty. There is interest in Benjamin Nygren.

This squad is going to undergo a major transformation and reconfiguration in the summer.

So this really is the last ditch effort from the guys who are carryovers from Ange’s team, and the guys Brendan brought here who were so instrumental in delivering the title over the last two years.

It feels like we are watching the end of an era.

It feels like we are watching a great cycle of Celtic sides coming to an end.

I do not know what we are going to be watching next season. No one knows what we are going to be watching next season.

Jerry Krause’s arrogance made sure that the Bulls never won another championship. They have not won one since. Whatever restructuring plan he had in his head was unsuccessful.

I am not saying Celtic will suffer the same fate. We won’t. We absolutely won’t.

But I am saying that the shape of next season’s team is unknown, and there are doubts over whether it will reach the heights and set the standards that first Ange’s team, and then Brendan’s team, did.

The documentary is about the players who made up that Bulls side, Jackson himself, the way that season unfolded, and also a retrospective on what they did in the first three-in-a-row and then the second.

It is outstanding.

I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who loves sport, if for no other reason than to watch the unparalleled brilliance of Jordan in action. He was a competitor of the highest order. Not merely an elite competitor, but a towering figure in the game, the basketball equivalent of Lionel Messi.

If you think basketball is simple or uncomplicated, watch him do things that should have been impossible. Watch how he dominates opponents. These were some of the best players in the world at that time, towering figures among their peers, and yet none of them could touch him.

But the story is worth it too.

The journey through their first success, their collapse, their second spell of dominance and the final Last Dance season is compelling from start to finish. It shows how a great team, a truly great all-time team, can set a standard so high for itself and for those around it that its shadow looms far into the future.

There was no question that Bulls team was one of the greatest ever to play the sport.

I will not say that this is a truly great Celtic side in that sense.

But it does break my heart a little to see it being broken up when it still has success in front of it, when it can still accomplish more, when the addition of a couple of quality players could raise the overall standard again.

If I had my way, that is how this season finale would go.

If we get to the double and win the double, I would sit those players down and tell them that for the next two years, we want them all to stay.

The key guys.

I would tell Alistair Johnston, Benjamin Nygren, Arne Engels, Reo Hatate and Daizen Maeda that there is more to come from this club. There is more to come from this team. I would keep the core pieces of the unit together and make it the policy of the club to add the required quality to bring up the overall standard.

Then, next season, we would be ready to go again.

Fortified. Improved. Not completely rebuilt.

What we are seeing right now is the top guys, the really key players, the ones most likely to depart, putting on their A-game. They are putting on their show. They are making sure they leave the club with a solid foundation to build on, just as Jordan did, just as Pippen did, just as Dennis Rodman did, and just as Phil Jackson did.

They all knew that would be their last season together. They all knew they would go their separate ways at the end of it and move on to other, not necessarily better, things.

That is what this feels like now. Doesn’t it feel like a closing chapter?

As Matthew said earlier, if this is the final act, if we are now in the final games for guys like Maeda, then what a way to go out. As champions. As double winners. What a way for Daizen himself to sign off, one of the truly great players of this era, with a world-class goal against the Ibrox club.

Jordan retired after that season. Scottie Pippen left on freedom of contract and got the deal that his phenomenal career deserved, the one Krause and the Bulls had never given him. Rodman left too. Phil Jackson proved his credentials by going on to build another dynastic team at the Lakers.

That is what great managers do.

Martin O’Neill will not go on to take up another management role somewhere else. I would be very surprised if he did. But he and everyone else involved can know, if we are champions, that they have done something extraordinary.

The five-in-a-row team will have done something supporters will never forget.

They will not have delivered the best title I can remember. But they will have delivered the sweetest. Only a really successful team can have a Last Dance.

Unsuccessful teams do not get that. They just get broken up. They get scattered to the four winds and nobody pays attention, nobody notices, nobody cares.

But when a good side, a winning side, gets broken up, that is different.

People pay attention. People remember. They recognise that one chapter is closing.

I always believed this team had it in them to rise above the challenges it faced and win this title. I never really thought about it in terms of The Last Dance for most of the season, although I did reference it at the start of the campaign when it looked like being Brendan’s final year.

Yet the more this season has gone on, the more I have thought about it.

The more I have watched this team, the more I have felt that this looks like a squad which knows it is coming to the end of its cycle. Now, in the final weeks of the season, it appears determined to sign off with a glorious finish.

We are now just two games away from it.

Two games from the double. Two games from five in a row. From a Last Dance worthy of the name.

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