Another final-day showdown, another final-day heartbreak. The pain has been spread over 61 years, but that won’t make it any easier to bear for Hearts who, having been top for 250 days of the Scottish Premiership season, missed out on the title again.
There was, of course, a Celtic penalty for handball and a critical video assistant referee decision that went their way, but, on this occasion, neither provided the controversy. That came from the confusion as the game was ended by a pitch invasion with 23 seconds, plus whatever else the referee felt needed to be added, still to play.
Some incursions are largely joyous, forgivable as spontaneous eruptions of emotion, but while that may have been true for most of those who spilled out of the stands, there were also many who confronted Hearts players. Even if the invasion had been purely celebratory, fans cannot be allowed to dictate when games finish.
For Martin O’Neill, the Celtic manager, this was a remarkable finale. At 74, he has his fourth Scottish title, and surely the most remarkable, achieved by winning the final eight games of the league season. That will become a double if Celtic can beat Dunfermline in the Scottish Cup final next Saturday. But remarkable as the turnaround he enacted was, the story of Saturday and of this season was Hearts.
It will not feel so yet, or perhaps for several years, but, almost more important than winning or losing, is simply that Hearts were involved, that they had a chance of winning 40 years after they went to Dundee on the final day needing a draw and lost 2-0 to a pair of Albert Kidd goals in the final seven minutes as Celtic took the title on goal difference.
This time they got even closer, four minutes remaining when Daizen Maeda squeezed in the goal that put Celtic in front. Hearts had also lost it on the final day in 1965, when Kilmarnock beat them 2-0 at Tynecastle to take the title by 0.04 goal-average.
Whatever the outcome, this was a day that was going to live for ever in the history of the club. Everybody will have their tale, whether they were among the 752 making up the official allocation at Celtic Park, among the many thousands packing the bars of Edinburgh’s Gorgie or simply watching at home. They ended up being tales of sorrow and regret, but having any tales of such magnitude should be relished; the worst thing in fandom is indifference.
There have been the breakout stories, those of fans who remember Hearts’ last league title, in 1960, experienced the two previous final-day agonies and assumed they would never see their side have a chance of winning the league again. The most notable, perhaps, has been the 73-year-old singer Colin Chisholm, who lost his parents in a car crash when he was 21 and has carried his father’s Hearts membership card in his pocket ever since. He has become a feature over the past few weeks, leading communal sing-alongs of the Hearts Song.
Death and remembrance, the strands that link communities through the ages: that’s what days like this are about.
These are the days that give purpose to the drab 1-0 home defeats, the freezing afternoons watching terrible football, the erratic owners and grim relegations: there is enormous emotional debt to be paid for even the possibility of a high such as this might have provided.
There will be some bitterness about refereeing decisions, not in this game, but over the past week in the games against Motherwell, penalties not given to Hearts and that late VAR handball call for Celtic, but, as the decades pass, what will remain is remembrance of the sense of togetherness, a group of people joined in improbable hope. With all due deference to the superclubs, and acknowledgment of just how raucously Celtic fans celebrated – they certainly have not seemed jaded by success in the past two games – it does mean more to the clubs who experience such days once in a lifetime.
That does raise the question of whether this is a one-off. Tony Bloom with his Jamestown Analytics data model has brought success to Brighton in England and to Union Saint-Gilloise in Belgium. Why should it not work again next season? Why should it not be even more successful when there has been more time to implements its lessons?
But then Celtic are unlikely to appoint Wilfried Nancy for a second time or Rangers Russell Martin. That is the flip side of this season: well as Hearts have played, it has exposed just how poorly the Glaswegian giants are run, how their parochial wrangling has blinded them to developments elsewhere and left them exposed to just such a challenge.
Hearts may not go away, but Celtic will not be this bad again. Hearts will hope, and Scottish football should hope, this level of competitiveness can be sustained. Other clubs, perhaps, can draw encouragement that the big two are not quite invincible. Hearts can build and go again. Celtic and Rangers, certainly, should be shaken from their lethargy.
Titles can’t always be settled with four minutes of the season remaining, but they may well be more keenly contested than they have been. Hearts have shown a way and all of Scottish football should thank them for that.