Aidan Smith: Like a disappointing Christmas morning...Scottish football is back!

Hibernian's Martin Boyle (left) with Ryan Porteous during a training session at the Hibernian Training Centre

Or they might think back to when that large brown envelope from the Exam Results Board confirmed the passes which were confidently expected, but all of them measly Cs. Or maybe the return of the national game will be like finally succeeding in tracking down a long lost love, only to realise that they have changed.

Football is coming back - kicking off with Aberdeen vs Rangers - but not as we know it. Without any fans, the start of the new season will be bittersweet.

The players will lunge and clatter into each other in this most incendiary of fixtures but they will do so in an echo-chamber without the choruses of disapproval from the stands. The supporter wondering how to glug his Bovril through a facemask, or whether they are socially distanced enough from fellow fans before launching into a spittle-flecked tirade of abuse, will be spared these ideological conundrums, at least for the time being.

But football in any form is a good thing. Well, isn’t it? We should remember the epic rammy of the spring which seemed to imperil its continued existence. How could we not? That’s still rumbling.

Calling the previous season in the wake of Covid relegated Hearts, Partick Thistle and Stranraer, prompting condemnation, outrage, whataboutery, vote farces, jabbing fingers, huffy flounces, court battles, dire threats and a welter of accusations of incompetence, corruption and desperate self-interest.

Vain attempts to broker peace with references to the “football family” causes ripples of hilarity which may even have spread as far as Buck House where the Queen could have been forgiven for the pronouncement: “One has one’s problems right now with one’s own brood but nothing like this.”

Scottish football, it was obvious, could start an argument in an empty stadium. Which was apt and highly prescient, as that’s where the game finds itself now.

The new normal - the post-Covid footballscape - means no fans in the Premiership until … well, your guess is as good as mine. Curtailed campaigns for the Championship and League One and Two won’t begin until the autumn at least, when the Scotland team will aim to resume their tortuous efforts to return to the finals of an international tournament with a Euros playoff against Israel. The Scottish Cup final traditionally takes place on a sunny day in May - our erratic, girny climate invariably comes good for the oldest cup competition in the world - but the held-over one from last season will now happen in the depths of winter, a few days before Christmas.

Such confusion and clutter does not appear to be giving football its best chance to put a smile back on faces, even ones still hidden by masks. But maybe - just maybe - the Scottish game’s habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory will be reversed this time and out of an unpromising situation it will demonstrate resilience and maybe some of that old gallus swagger as well.

The people still believe in it. Take Hibernian, my team, who begin against Kilmarnock tomorrow, with more than 10,000 fans having purchased season tickets despite health supremo Jason Leitch offering them no assurances whatsoever on a likely date for them being able to cheer for/shout at their favourites again. Loyalty … or lunacy? Actually, maybe don’t answer that one.

There are, if you look for them, plenty of reasons to be cheerful - and the Old Firm rivalry could never be said to be smiling shyly and coquettishly behind a pie-stand and certainly not in 2020-21. This will be the season that either Celtic make it a magical, mystical ten-in-a-row - consecutive championships never achieved before - or Rangers stop them. Frankly, that internecine struggle could play out in entirety on Jupiter with reports arriving back on Earth a week late and it would still be utterly engrossing.

Scottish football likes to make a mountain out of a molehill - a Ben Nevis out of a bump in the road - but this time the crisis is real. It needs the warring parties to kiss and make up but there’s probably a fat chance of that. So the best hopes are for great games and the fans to be allowed back soon. Per head of population we’ve been Euro champs for attendances and a famous juxtaposition of two social media photographs - one from Scotland, the other England - tells a fine truth: the crowd at the English game seems to be made up of football tourists preoccupied with their cameraphones, even when a goal has been scored; here, meanwhile, everyone just goes mental.

Incorrigible, ineluctable - that’s Scottish football. And hopefully indestructible too. The ba’s not up on the slates yet.