A magical Maeda moment sets Celtic up for a magical title.

Sometimes life gives you a moment that is so perfect that you have to pinch yourself to make sure you aren’t dreaming. You have to pinch yourself because asking the guy next to you to do it gets you stared at. I think there was more pinching going on today than if the Ibrox players fell into a barrel of crabs. Is that a reference to stories about their squad using recovery hotels to entertain hookers? Maybe it is. I’ll never ever tell. But we all know the moment I mean. Wasn’t that incredible?

Every football fan has a wee preference for different things. Great goals. Great sending offs. The worst tackles ever. The worst defensive or goalkeeping errors. For comedy, the most incredible misses. I like all that. But I like pressure goals and the greater the pressure the more outrageous it is to see a moment of magic.

You can win a massive, all or nothing game with a tap-in but to do with a piece of individual brilliance is what brings the house down, and as you can imagine, there are a lot of great goals and a lot of big goals but big goals which also have the wow factor? Much less common. And when you see them you never forget them.

Today we saw one. A goal for the ages. That was nuts today. I expected us to win, I knew when Maeda turned up for business in the cup semi-final that he was going to have an impact on the rest of this campaign and I said before the game in the Tavernier piece that he would write the headlines and give El Capitan one last nightmare to leave with, but nobody saw Maeda producing that. Nobody.

He says it was lucky. He is having a laugh. There are players you cannot imagine producing a goal like that by anything other than luck but he is not one of them. There is something about Maeda which made him one of my favourite players almost from the first moment he played in this team; all fans love a player who grafts and he works harder than any Celtic player I’ve ever watched. But he also captures the imagination. He is not a Larsson or a Dembele, from whom a goal like that would be admired but not take your breath away. But capable of it? Most definitely yes.

It is tempting to make this whole article about him. It is tempting to make the whole article about the goal. I don’t want to do that and yet I can see me writing another 1000 words before I get onto another subject. Paulina and I have discussed her big piece for tomorrow and she’s going to write something that blows the doors of the building; allow me just to say this. That was a performance worthy of champions.

And for many months, since we came out of Hell Week intact, since we showed the guts and determination to go through that period and still be standing, there has been a growing conviction that this team’s great strengths still outweigh its weaknesses. The question was this; were those strengths enough to get us to the title?

We’re not there yet. Nobody should be celebrating, although I’m writing this from the pub and there will be a lot of celebrating getting done and you better believe that. We have, after all, denied the Ibrox club a “trophy” today. Since the media is framing it just so we must be entitled to celebrate it the same way. If stopping Celtic winning the title was like winning a trophy for them, what do we get for stopping them stopping us, ending their fleeting title hopes and guaranteeing they’ll finish third? A Eurovision Song Contest gong maybe. Certainly nothing to do with football.

More on that subject later and you had better believe it.

None of it will mean a damned thing unless we win on Wednesday. None of it will matter unless we take six more points and Callum McGregor hoists that trophy. The achievement today should be put in its proper context; it was winning a match against a hapless, psychologically crushed opponent who allowed themselves to dream and then woke to find that a dream is all that it was.

There is a great fable about an ass who finds the skin of lion and for a while he goes around pretending he is one and frightening the other animals in it. But the moment he opens his mouth he reveals what he is. That’s the Ibrox club now. If we’re going to go with the animal comparisons let’s try this; they are a RINO. Rangers In Name Only. They are finding out that wearing the jersey doesn’t make them big or strong. In fact, that jersey is half the problem, and one that’s not going away.

Today we knew what we had to do and we did it. This is what we learned all those weeks ago when we came out of Hell Week alive, standing and in the cup semi final. This team has this in them. And Maeda had that in him, that outrageous moment that made grown men stand with their jaws agape, wondering if the next sensation would be the ringing of the alarm clock and waking in their beds thinking “Good God if only that had been real.”

Well it was real alright. The dream goes on. Don’t, for the love of all that is holy, wake us up now.