Many expect Saturday to be no different. The two teams have not met in the Scottish Premiership for four years, ever since years of financial mismanagement and misdeeds caught up with Rangers and led to their liquidation. The club was dissolved and forced to start again, in the country’s fourth tier.

Since then, Celtic and Rangers have encountered each other only twice: both in Scottish cup competitions, both on neutral territory. The city, then, is crackling with anticipation for the teams’ first league meeting at Celtic Park. As early as Tuesday, The Evening Times was devoting six pages to the game. A slew of former players, from both sides, have spent the week being wheeled out for sound bites.

With that excitement, though, comes trepidation. This is an enmity with roots that run far deeper than mere sport: Rangers and Celtic is not soccer, it is religion and politics and history. It is Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Irish Nationalist, the Union Jack and the Tricolor: two sides of several unbridgeable divides.

There was a feeling, in 2012, that perhaps the two clubs might somehow come to realize they were locked, however unwillingly, in a mutually beneficial arrangement.