And so it goes, friends. And so it goes.

Just when you think the script has been written, somebody goes and submits a new draft. The problem is that Scottish football’s scriptwriters are not particularly original, so the same story keeps repeating itself.

A couple of positive results get the Ibrox club buzzing and convincing itself that something special is happening. A couple of reversals for Celtic and suddenly everybody forgets how we became champions in the first place.

We are a mess as a club right now. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But we are still the biggest club in this country.

The Ibrox club may have spent a lot of money.

It may currently be the darling of large sections of the media. But it remains a broken and failed institution, one capable of raising itself for a handful of occasions every season without ever turning that into sustained superiority.

Their results against Celtic over the past few years have actually been pretty good.

What good has it done them? Not much.

And so today we have an opportunity and I am going to talk about that a little later. But for now, just for now, because this is what we do in these pieces, let’s talk about them.

I am not going to say that I have been vindicated. I am not going to say it because the vindication has not come yet. But it will.

I have no doubt about that, and I never really have.

If Celtic can get its act together even a little bit and keep it together, we will win this title at a walk, because the Ibrox club is not good.

The hysterical overreaction to two wins over us, victories all of us could see coming a mile away, was never evidence of anything special happening over there. Those results came because we were poor, not because they had suddenly become brilliant.

And nothing that has happened since has disguised the reality of what they are.

People have allowed themselves to be conned again by a couple of decent performances, but this remains a dreadful side. McInnes is a dreadful coach.

His post-match interview was embarrassing on a whole new level. We have all criticised some of the things that come out of Martin O’Neill’s mouth, but some of what came out of McInnes’s last night was even worse.

He sounded like a manager constantly second-guessing himself, constantly doubting himself, constantly doubting his own players, and still unsure of what his best team actually is.

And they, even more than Celtic right now, rely on individual players producing moments because they do not function properly as a team.

What they did against us was exploit obvious, easily diagnosed weaknesses which other managers with far fewer resources have already spotted and exploited.

That is all they did. It did not make them special. It meant that, in those two games, Celtic were absolutely awful.

And every one of us saw it coming.

We have people in the media who seem to think the audience is as stupid as they are.

Take Keevins. Before a ball had even been kicked, he predicted that the Ibrox club would win the title. Then, when Celtic went five points clear, he started backtracking furiously. After the two wins over us, though, the whole thing flipped again.

Suddenly they were the best team in the country by a mile. Suddenly nobody was going to take points off them. He could not even imagine where their next dropped points were coming from. Apparently they were going to win the league easily.

It has taken two games to burst that bubble. Two. McInnes’s league record this season is played nine, won six, drawn two, lost one.

That means they have dropped points in one third of their league matches. One third. Carry that sort of return across a season and you are barely getting to 80 points.

And I will say again what I said at the start: Celtic did more to hurt Celtic in those two games than they did to hurt us. I am more afraid of us than I am of them.

And I am not afraid of them at all.

Nothing I saw last night shocked me in the slightest. They are woeful. A good Celtic team would have buried them already.

Over and over again, they do it to themselves. Over and over again, they stumble into the same trap. And this is where perspective matters.

We have spent the best part of a month in self-flagellation and mourning, and all of it was justified. We are out of the League Cup. That is bad. It hurts. But we have lost that competition before in recent years and survived it.

If Celtic wins today, then after one of the most hellish periods we have experienced in recent seasons, the league damage amounts to this: one point surrendered from a five-point lead.

That is it. One point.

Four weeks ago, if you had told us everything that was about to happen, the defeats, the chaos, the pressure, the dreadful performances and the general sense that the roof was falling in, and then told us we could emerge from all of that having lost only one point of our league advantage over the Ibrox club, most of us would have taken it.

Of course we would.

That does not make everything fine. It does not turn this miserable spell into some kind of blip we should simply forget. It does not erase the problems.

But it puts the damage in perspective.

If Celtic wins today, we go four points clear again.

It is not the eight-point lead we could have opened up by beating them at Celtic Park. It is not the ten-point gap we might have been looking at after that.

But it is daylight. It would mean we could lose a game and still be top. It would mean their margin for error gets tighter again because they cannot afford to keep giving ground. And if there is one thing we know about that club, it is that they are capable of self-harm every bit as much as we are, and perhaps even more so.

I do not accept that Celtic’s bad spell was merely a blip. I do not accept that it was something we simply have to get past, as though there were no lessons to learn from it and as though it did not expose deep-rooted problems at every level of the club.

I am not going to pretend any of that.

We are still in a bad place. But on our day, we are still the better team. Over the course of a 38-game league campaign, I still expect us to win it.

And that is why the fear and loathing were back on their forums last night.

That little three-week spell where they were smugly congratulating themselves is over. Gone. Nothing but a memory. Now all the old doubts have resurfaced. All the old pain is being felt again. All the old wounds have reopened.

And they are scared. They are right to be scared. Because the myth of this great Ibrox team is exactly that: a myth.

Anyone who has watched them this season knows it. It is not an accident that they dropped points at the first genuinely difficult away fixture. It is not some freak occurrence that they have done again what they have done before, over and over.

You want to talk about mentality? You want to talk about the iron will it takes to get over the line in a title race? They do not have it.

So, the fear is real, and they should embrace it. They should stop allowing themselves to be fooled by a couple of positive results.

As for the loathing, take your pick.

Dan Neil’s honeymoon lasted only as long as it took for Sinisalo to pick the ball out of the net for his second goal against us. They have already gone back to questioning him and questioning the signing all over again.

We have seen this before. They turn mediocre footballers into heroes because of one performance against Celtic, then tear them back down again the moment reality intervenes.

They will do it again and again and again because we are what defines that club.

Nothing else. And so, in time, the love turns to loathing.

That is what Dan Neil is facing now. Him and plenty of others over there, including the manager. And I am loving it.

I am sitting here right now. It is 2am. And I feel pretty good about things.

Not about my own club. My own club has a huge job to do today, and by God, we had better do it. But I feel good because once again I know I am looking at this with a clear head.

My brutal, unsentimental assessment of what that club is and where that club is has been proved right again.

Not vindication. That comes later. But I have seen what I needed to see. We all have. Including their own supporters.

Which is why, if Celtic wins today, every week for them will start to feel like dragging themselves through hell again.

The pressure will be back on them. Every point they drop gives us another opportunity to move further ahead.

And this is the part Celtic cannot afford to misunderstand.

The biggest threat to this Celtic side is still this Celtic side. More specifically, it is this Celtic side and the board which has left it so badly exposed.

That remains true whether we are one point ahead, four points ahead or ten points ahead.

The Ibrox club is not what frightens me.

Celtic failing to sort out Celtic frightens me far more.

But if we can stabilise, if we can stop punching ourselves in the face long enough to remember what kind of team we can be, then this title is there to be won.

And the smugness across the city? That already looks a little less convincing than it did a week ago. Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.