After last week, no Celtic fan will have the least sympathy for Hearts.

I used to say to people that I grew up watching what were, at the time, the twin loves of my life getting banjoed all over the place: the Labour Party and Celtic.

I fell out of love with one of them. I quit political activism shortly after the Iraq War began. But I never fell out of love with Celtic.

In 1997, Labour won its first election since I was a baby. A year later, Celtic won its first title in a decade. I grew up with Rangers winning leagues and Tories winning elections. Those two events, coming so close to each other, were catharsis.

Don’t get me wrong, Celtic were never completely out of it. We won things. We just didn’t win a lot of things. We were never consistently on the winners’ rostrum, and there were plenty of people who doubted we would stop the ten or win a league again for a long time.

They certainly never foresaw where things stand right now.

I’ve said it before: this is the club David Murray dreamed of building.

So, I can imagine how it feels to be an Ibrox supporter at the moment, broken by years of watching Celtic’s dominance grow. They have three trophies in 14 years. Three. That’s one every four years. They have become just another club, with the only thing separating them from the rest being their solitary league title, won in the Covid campaign. Had Hearts been a little bit better at Celtic Park, they might not even have that to boast about.

To be brought up on stories of supremacy and dominance, only to see your team reduced to that, has got to be hard. I understand why they are where they are mentally.

As we go out today to play a cup final and hopefully add to our trophy haul, extend the lead over even the lie, and show them what real dominance looks like, a lot of them have snapped.

That is a fact. You can see it all over their forums.

But I never thought I would say this: at this moment in time, there are people in the game crazier than they are.

The song asks “What becomes of the broken-hearted?”

Well, you can go on the Hearts forums and see. Believe me when I say this: it is a sight to behold.

Not even at their lowest ebb did I see Ibrox fans crown themselves league champions and tell the world it did not matter what the actual champions thought.

Hearts fans seem to think the whole planet is rooting for them. They seem to think the whole world sees this the way they do.

But here’s the thing. They haven’t learned that a bad loser becomes tiresome.

There are few things more boring. People will listen to you for a while if you claim malign forces stood against you. But eventually, they start to zone out.

That is particularly true when your club has spent the last week misleading people about what actually took place at Celtic Park. You lose the high ground a little bit. You only have to listen to people like Simon Jordan doing a full 180-degree reversal on this subject to realise that a lot of people who were made to look foolish are very unhappy about it.

So, there is not the sympathy out there Hearts think there is.

I should have a soft spot for these people, in a sense. I said a couple of weeks ago that if Hearts won the title, I would offer them my congratulations. I would have been perfectly happy to accept that, over 38 games, the best team won.

The league table does not lie.

It may exaggerate, but it tells the truth that matters: the best team over the course of a campaign emerges as champions.

The narrative Hearts are now pushing is garbage. I’m not just talking about the club, which has embarrassed itself with its conduct over the last seven days. I’m talking about the fans too. The story they are telling themselves is not even remotely true.

Nobody took the title away from them on Wednesday night last week.

They came to Celtic Park needing a draw.

That is the long and short of it. That is the fact of it. It was in their hands, and they couldn’t get over the line.

That is the simple truth.

Even if I were neutral, I would already be bored listening to this rubbish. As a fan of a genuinely big club, I look at their behaviour and see a small-team mentality.

Yet the thing is, I should still have some milk of human kindness running through me. I should understand where their fans find themselves.

Having come through the 90s and having seen my team go nine years without a title, having gone through seasons where Celtic finished fourth, having seen a more powerful rival threaten to dominate forever before we knew the full truth, I should be able to grasp at least a little of what one generation of Hearts fans feels.

It has been 60 years since they were champions.

That is a lifetime.

There are Hearts fans who have lived and died without ever seeing a league title. There are some who were born the year it last happened and are now in their sixties. There are others, perhaps in their seventies, who were there and hoped they would once again see their side claim the prize.

Their children and grandchildren will have heard stories of what that was like. They will all have dreamed of their own glorious day.

They still wait for it.

Even worse, imagine having been in Paisley 40 years ago and seen that day. Then this. To come so close twice in your lifetime. To need only a draw on the final day and be unable to get it, not once but twice, and to lose to Celtic both times.

That’s hard. They are entitled to resent that a bit.

It might be 40 years before a chance like that comes around again. It might be 60 more years before Hearts win a title, if they ever do. They have no way of knowing what next season will bring. All the confident talk and media hype may prove to be as worthless as paper money after the apocalypse.

There is a very real chance that a Hearts fan born today will not see a league title in their lifetime. None of their parents have, provided they support the club.

As a football fan who has been through a tiny sliver of that, who has gone nine years without a title, who has lived through seasons where his team looked miles away from the top, I should have some sympathy in my soul for those fans.

What can I tell you, except that I don’t?

What can I say, except that it is not there?

I feel no sympathy whatsoever. I feel no connection with their supporters at all. I feel no kinship with fellow football fans who have suffered a horrible reversal.

At full-time on Wednesday last week, looking at the faces of their players after we scored the penalty at Motherwell, I do believe I could have found that shred of sympathy. Then came the aftermath of that game, and the week we have just been through, and it’s gone.

If it was ever real in the first place, it no longer is.

There is a Hearts forum where they have declared themselves champions. They have resorted to Sevco-like language and called us cheats. The bitterness is understandable. The anger is real, although unjustified. The pain is very obviously there, and I have some conception of how they feel.

But not all the way.

Because we did win the title at Love Street. We did win the Centenary title in 1988. I wasn’t there at Love Street, but I was there on the day we were champions in that fabulous 100th year. I was there at the Scottish Cup final when we won the Centenary Double.

I remembered success.

I don’t know whether having had it and lost it is worse than never having known it at all. I’ve never thought about it in those terms. I’ve never attempted that kind of analysis, because what is it worth?

Nothing.

I know some Arsenal fans, and I’m pleased for them that their 20-year wait is at an end. I know some Liverpool fans too, and I was pleased for them when their own long wait for a title came to an end.

But both of those clubs, and both of those fan bases, had success all the way through that time. The wait for a title was long. The wait for a trophy, not so much. But the title is the one that counts, as everyone knows.

If I had sympathy for them, I should be able to find it for those on my own doorstep.

But the bile, the hatred, the refusal to accept the outcome was arrived at fairly and justly, the smears and slanders against our club and our fans, have burned that away.

I cannot sympathise with people who behave like that. I cannot sympathise with a club that behaves like that. I shouldn’t be expected to.

I don’t believe any great moral accounting would ever expect me to pay that bill.

Because over the course of this year, we have been willing to overlook a lot of what should be our own historic grievance with their club.

Hearts did the same bitching about our club when they were relegated during the Covid season, although they were rooted rock bottom of the league and that outcome was wholly justified by the circumstances of that time.

We were blamed for that too, but it was an emotional time and they were being whipped up to an extent by the pro-Ibrox media, just as they are now.

Harder to forgive was the behaviour of some of their supporters after the assault on Neil Lennon, when masks of the guy who attacked our then-manager appeared in their stands. That was poisonous and despicable.

Even that was not enough to completely poison me. I was still willing to offer them congratulations and goodwill in the European games they played over the last couple of years, as I do for every Scottish club but one. It would not have stopped me congratulating worthy winners if that is what they had proved to be.

But now? Now, I want this to hurt for years.

I want it to stretch on. Not just in terms of the league, which I don’t believe I will ever live to see them win, but in terms of trophies, in terms of Hampden, in terms of every moment where they convince themselves they are about to become something bigger than they are.

I feel they have earned our enmity. I feel they deserve that lack of goodwill. In fact, I feel a bottomless reservoir of ill will for every single person connected to that club right now.

I have spent some time on their forums this week to see how they are coping with this. I did not go there initially to gloat or to find ammunition. Think of it as an anthropological study. I wanted to know what the answer was to that maddening riddle contained in the lyrics to the song; what does become of the broken hearted?

What I found instead was an abyss of hatred and paranoia every bit as acute as you’ll find in the forums across the city.

All the same entitlement is there. Yet they are not the only football club whose fans have grown up without ever seeing a league title in Scotland. There are a handful of clubs whose living supporters have seen a league title outside this city.

Aberdeen took it to the final day at Ibrox, and just like Hearts, could not get over the line when all they needed was a draw. I’m sure their fans were furious. I realise it had not been 60 years for them when they went there full of hope and optimism. But Aberdeen never let themselves be defined by a lasting grievance.

I feel Hearts might.

Hibs haven’t won a league title since 1952. That is longer than Hearts. Unarguably, they have gone through more trials, travails and difficulties than Hearts ever have. But they do not seem consumed by the idea that the whole world is out to get them.

They may believe the Glasgow clubs have too much influence in the running of the game, which I have always said is a lazy diagnosis, especially from a club whose former chairman was president of the SFA for quite a time.

But they have never let it consume them.

I feel very much as if their rivals will be consumed by this.

I noticed there that I said their rivals.

Not our rivals.

Not in any sense of the word.

As much as I may harbour enormous negative feelings towards the hapless basket-case institution that lies just across the city, it is perfectly obvious that they take themselves seriously as a major club. Their chief executive said he considers them the biggest club in the country. I laughed at that and mocked it without mercy earlier in the week, as the delusional ravings of a madman.

But that feeling is shared across the whole club itself. In terms of size and scope, they are, and will remain, our only genuine competitor.

Hearts are not that.

And I wonder if maybe, at the heart of all the bitterness over there and all the arrogant pronouncements that they will be back, that they are the rightful champions, and that next season they are going to clean everybody’s clock and prove it, there is genuine grief born from an understanding that this is just a comforting fiction.

Hearts are like someone who buys a winning lottery ticket, then loses it before they can claim the prize.

You had it in your hand. You knew what it was. You knew the difference it would have made to your life.

Then it was gone.

The deadline passed.

You will never get the money.

You can collapse and spiral, or you can go out and buy yourself a ticket every week, just like clockwork, because maybe the gods will smile on you again. But deep down, you know that you only get one shot at that. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.

That is a hard situation.

That is a tough reality to face.

But do not ask me to feel sorry for them, because I can’t do it and I won’t do it.

The triumph of this week is made all the sweeter because they are hurting.

I would not have expected to say that just 14 days ago, but hell, rather a lot has happened since then.

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