Aidan Smith: Gone but not to be forgotten: the terrace where we stood up and sang up for the football club we love

STRANGE FEELINGS overcome you at times like these. Alan Gordon was tall and blond like Daryl Hall, one half of pop's most successful duo; Bobby Smith was short with dark curly hair and an impressive caterpillar mouser, like Hall's pal John Oates – and Hall & Oates' best song She's Gone was playing in my head as I joined the queue at the turnstiles. But was I really thinking that Hibs' East Stand, about to be the club's third loss in just over a week, had a gender and

It was just an old terrace, sawn in half and roofed, benched then bucket-seated, with rubbish sightlines, outdoor cludgies and an alfresco Bovril stand, which for years had been forced to look on with windblown envy while the rest of Easter Road grew up, got botoxed with breeze-block, wood being replaced with concrete, the pillars removed and the ends neatly closed off. But, hey, the East was home.

Or it was until yesterday and the signs went up: "This property is condemned." And that was a good thing, yes? Well, yes and no. Yes and maybe. Yes and of course it'll be nice to be able to see what happens when Ian Murray horses up the left wing, instead of him seeming to dematerialise a good ten yards from the corner flag. And: yes, all right, the East was a bit of a cowp by the end, but it was our last link with the past, the stadium as it was in Gordon and Smith's era – indeed Gordon Smith's era – and what are football fans if not a bunch of sentimental fools?

First, we were searched for screwdrivers. Not since the YLT – Young Leith Team – were in their bovver-booted pomp had there been a full bodysearch by stewards at the gates. I couldn't work out why, and why security had been particularly concerned about screwdrivers, but when I found my way to X68 it dawned on me: they didn't want us nicking the seats as souvenirs. Perversely, for old time's sake, I was hoping X68 would be pillar-restricted, but it was the perfect vantage point. There was a minute's applause for the old heroes, and an early penalty from the new one, Anthony Stokes, but then the game got a bit stodgy and I can't have been the only one who was half-shutting his eyes and replaying great goals from bygones ages.

Alan Gordon's Hibees were a team best viewed from a full, open terrace almost brushing the clouds, standing on beer cans if you weren't wearing platforms, peering down on a sloping pitch with a crackly Tannoy belting out glam hits by Slade and Wizzard. And funnily enough, that's exactly how we watched Turnbull's Tornadoes.

I know I wasn't the only one doing this because some were singing about Franck Sauzee and Mickey Weir, others about Super Joe McBride. An older fan warbled "They call him Marinello", as in Peter, to the tune of Donovan's Mellow Yellow. It seemed like we were going to be treated to the entire greatest hits – Now That's What I Call Easter Road – but they stopped just short of "We're off to Dublin in the green" and "Get it up you while you're young" (good thing, too).

Everyone was standing and everyone was singing. Everyone was singing because they were standing.

But in the Health & Safety age we almost certainly won't be allowed to stay on our feet in the structure replacing the East. It's a worry, and one emphasised yesterday in the chant "Can you hear the West Stand sing?" Across the other side, we couldn't.

A man behind me claimed to have returned from the loos with a brick memento, but I didn't see it. I took some photographs to show my boy but, really, what I needed on my camera-phone was a setting marked "1973" so that in the resultant snaps everyone would have long hair and be wearing Ben Sherman shirts, courtesy of B. Hyam of Leith Street.

On celebratory days or poignant ones you really want your team to win. Alan Gordon's Hibs beat Ayr Utd 8-1 the week after lifting the League Cup but yesterday St Johnstone grabbed an equaliser and a point. Probably no one felt like grabbing a seat after that, though "East 'til I die" was a lusty-enough finale.

She's gone.