A lot of people wonder when Celtic made the transition from being one of the two dominant clubs in the country to becoming unquestionably the biggest club in Scotland.

And sometimes I wonder whether the answer is simpler than we think. Maybe what changed was what Celtic decided to be.

I regard John Reid as one of the most transformational figures in Celtic’s recent history, and the reason is that he put this club on the front foot.

He made Celtic aggressive. He was the chairman who declared that we would no longer sit at the back of the bus. He said that Celtic wanted to be treated like every other club and would accept nothing less.

But behind those words was another suggestion. Maybe Celtic were not simply like every other club. Maybe we were bigger than every other club in this league. Because saying that Celtic would no longer sit at the back of the bus carried another implication with it.

It was our turn to sit at the front.

For a long time before that, Celtic had wallowed in the notion of victimhood. We were the plucky underdog fighting against an establishment which hated us and a country which despised us. Not everything about that picture was imaginary, and some fundamental parts of the argument remain exactly as they always were.

We are not, and we never will be, the establishment club.

We are the club of the underdog.

But that does not mean we have to be the underdog club.

That is an important distinction.

And I think that subtle shift in mentality helped make the following decade possible.

The moment Celtic stopped behaving like victims and started acting as though we genuinely believed we were the biggest club in the country, the whole mindset changed. Part of what followed, of course, was accelerated by the biblical collapse of the Ibrox club.

But Celtic were already on the brink of something before that happened.

Things inside the club had changed. The mentality of the support had changed. The mood around Celtic had changed. Go back and read the blogs from that period and you can see it happening almost in real time.

Supporters had started thinking of Celtic as the biggest club in Scotland, and we had started talking about the club in those terms. That changed expectations. It changed confidence. It changed the way we looked at the future.

That is why, when some sites started talking about a generation of dominance, those of us who could read the runes were not laughing.

We could see it too. We could see the shape of what was coming.

Across the city, they once thought they were something special. As time has worn on, that confidence has evaporated and been replaced increasingly by an obsession with the past.

One of the frustrations some of us have with the Celtic board is that it occasionally appears guilty of the same thing, looking backwards at what has already been achieved instead of projecting strength into the future.

Because Celtic are the biggest club in the country now. There is no serious dispute about that anymore. The frustration is what we do with that power, how we extend it and how we build on the influence we possess.

But we reached this position because, at some point, Celtic chose to behave as though this was where we belonged.

We projected strength. We acted like winners. And that brings me to the Hearts chairman, Calum Paterson, and his comments this week.

Because they sound astonishingly like the Celtic mentality we eventually learned to leave behind. The sense of grievance and victimhood now surrounding Hearts would not have sounded remotely out of place around Celtic Park twenty years ago.

The difference is that Celtic supporters had genuine reasons to mistrust parts of the football establishment. We had lived through the Jim Farry affair. We later saw the refereeing scandal which ended with Dougie McDonald’s resignation. We know that Rangers operated an EBT scheme for years and that the governing bodies subsequently faced serious questions about how aspects of that period were handled.

Our sense that something was wrong did not emerge from thin air.

I do not know what comparable case Hearts think they have.

When Paterson says that Hearts “haven’t forgotten” what happened towards the end of last season, part of me wants to offer him a warning.

And part of me absolutely does not.

Because we have seen where this mentality leads. It held Celtic back. It has led the Ibrox club down innumerable rabbit holes of paranoia and conspiracy thinking.

And Hearts now appear determined to march down the same road.

Based on what? They are still complaining about the circumstances surrounding the final game of last season, when they arrived at Celtic Park needing only a draw to become champions. They took the lead. They had the title exactly where they wanted it.

They were minutes away from winning it.

Then the roof came in.

Celtic equalised, scored late and then added another at the death. Hearts lost the championship because they lost the football match which would have won it for them.

I understand that it hurts. Of course it hurts.

But turning that pain into a permanent grievance is something else entirely.

They have complained bitterly about the SPFL sending them to Celtic Park on the final day rather than giving them a home fixture.

What difference would reversing the order actually have made?

Celtic won all five post-split games. Hearts lost at Celtic Park and drew at Motherwell. If those results remain the same, changing the order changes nothing.

A final home fixture for Hearts would simply have taken place after Celtic had already accumulated the points required to pass them.

And let’s be perfectly honest about something else. Whoever constructed that final fixture sequence played an absolute blinder.

The reigning champions against the league leaders.

Celtic Park. 60,000 supporters. Second against first. The championship on the line. You could hardly have designed a better final-day television event.

And then the game delivered everything anybody selling Scottish football could have dreamed of. Hearts took the lead. Celtic equalised. The second half unfolded under increasingly unbearable tension as Hearts moved closer and closer to the title.

Then Celtic scored in the closing minutes, and then scored again at the death.

Box office. That phrase was thrown around Scottish football all season. Well, how can anybody seriously argue that this was not box office?

It was our Michael Thomas moment. Our Sergio Agüero moment.

I completely understand why Hearts supporters hated every second of the ending. They were on the wrong side of one of the most brutal conclusions to a title race imaginable. But that does not make it an injustice.

The pitch invasion afterwards was chaotic and Celtic were right to take a considered, and measured, position on it. Martin O’Neill was equally right to defend the pitch invasion as something commonplace across the game, and never subjected to such hysterical over-reaction as accompanied the one which took place that day.

Even Hearts argument over the premature final whistle went nowhere. The SFA subsequently released the audio showing that referee Don Robertson ended the match after consultation with Derek McInnes, who wanted his players off the pitch.

The governing body backed the referee’s decision.

So, what exactly is the great conspiracy?

Hearts were not denied the championship by an administrative decision. They were not denied it by the fixture computer. They were not denied it because the final match was played at Celtic Park. They were denied it because, with the title in their hands and a lead on the scoreboard, they could not hold on.

That is painful. But it is the essence of football.

If Hearts want to become a genuinely major club, they need to start thinking like one. Big clubs do not construct their identity around explanations for why somebody else prevented them succeeding. They look at what went wrong and fix it.

Convince yourself that failure was somebody else’s fault and you learn nothing. You take no stock of why you fell short. You correct none of the mistakes.

And that sets you up perfectly for the next failure.

How do Celtic supporters know this? Because we lived through it. For years we viewed ourselves as victims of circumstances beyond our control, and it was only when Celtic started taking responsibility for our own fate, started considering ourselves the biggest club in the country and began acting accordingly that the dynamic changed.

That is why I hold Reid in such high regard as chairman. He did not invent Celtic’s transformation, and Fergus McCann had laid enormously important foundations before him. But Reid gave that new mentality a voice.

We were not going to sit at the back of the bus. We were not going to define ourselves through what other people supposedly did to us. We were going to assert ourselves.

Think like the biggest club, act like the biggest club, and without dispute we would eventually prove ourselves the biggest club.

And that is why my warning to Hearts comes with an enormous caveat.

Part of me hopes they ignore every word of it. Because as long as our rivals want to limit themselves with this kind of thinking, they make Celtic’s job easier. The Ibrox club has spent years indulging the belief that Scottish football is a conspiracy arrayed against it.

You know what that creates?

An inferiority complex. A permanent sense of victimhood. A belief that your fate is controlled by somebody else and that you are therefore powerless to improve your own position.

If Hearts want to become more than perennial underachievers and occasional challengers, they need to behave as though their destiny is in their own hands.

Last season was not evidence that Scottish football stopped them. It was evidence that they came incredibly close and failed. There are lessons in that. There is something to build on.

But only if they are willing to learn from it.

Hold onto the alternative if you want. Keep telling yourselves that you were not beaten, merely wronged. Keep nursing the grievance. Keep promising that you will never forget.

It rather suits us.

Because that is not how you build a winning mentality.

That is how you institutionalise excuses.

Celtic learned that lesson a long time ago.

And in my view, the moment we truly started learning it was when John Reid told the world that we would no longer sit at the back of the bus.

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