This has been a season like no other.

When Third Lanark went under in 1967 they did so amid an irreverent silence which reflected the need not to be associated in any way with the body in the pauper's grave. Discussion of their demise was at a minimum. They were left to rot by an uncaring community largely preoccupied with the audacity of a bunch of local boys winning a European trophy. Scottish football seemed locked into the inevitable progress of self-sustaining growth.

Nothing, though, prepared us for this season of final reckoning. For we now face the test of finding a common cause to ensure the survival of the entire species, not just that of any single club. With Hearts on the skids and the Rangers board looking as if it is built on the San Andreas Fault line, we are on the verge of an unprecedented cataclysm from which no club in the country will be immune.

There is a real possibility of contagion and yet it appears acrimony is an easier option than common sense. Those who are enjoying the spectacle of seeing two major institutions battle for survival in their different ways had better be wary.

In a way it reminds me of the time when Ravenscraig and the mines were to be "sorted out", when the crude application of an economic plan was applauded from the sidelines by some who thought they would be unscathed by the process of wiping out these industrial dinosaurs.

Those who had been whooping it up in support of the cull became victims themselves. Unemployment touched those who thought they were untouchable. Small businesses whose self-confidence bolstered their belief in invulnerability collapsed in the wake of communities being effectively destroyed. The rights and wrongs of such a policy are not the issue here. It is the misjudgment of consequences which is.

Of course it is easy to find jubilation over the plight of these two clubs since it is self-evident that reckless mismanagement prompted by the need to keep ahead of their immediate rivals unfairly – using what proved to be imaginary financial muscle – would be found out in the end.

They deserve to be in the stew. That is the brief and effective case for treating them like lepers and doing nothing. Yet that view represents a classic case of tunnel vision. The worst-case scenario for Hearts is liquidation and re-entry into the lowest division as per the Rangers model.

But try to envisage our top league without these clubs, even for a few short years, and think of the sense of loss of credibility to our top echelon, let alone the uncertainty over finances which would ensue. We already have a league which only one club can possibly win and the consolation prize of being runners-up has to be portrayed as the great incentive.

In short, the Premier League already looks as if it has been constructed by a taxidermist, stuffed with an absolute certainty of outcome. There is surely a case to be made for special treatment that will speed up the process by which our top league is denuded no further in terms of the numbers who go through the turnstiles and to which Hearts this season and Rangers in the past have contributed mightily.

The rules of association ought not to dismiss punitive sanctions. They ought still to be harsh. But is it destroying the principle of sporting integrity to remove the automatic sanction of relegation through financial default? I am of the belief that there are voices within Celtic Park who would not have wanted Rangers to be relegated but rather a points penalty and a transfer ban.

If you have watched Rangers this season you will realise they would have struggled to avoid relegation from the Premier League, and that would have been a greater indignity than traipsing the road in the third division. Putting them in the bottom league could be construed as having been an accidental act of charity. Let us spare a thought, difficult though it may be in this acrimonious age, for those supporters who have been gulled by chancers but whose loyalty could be construed by others as dumb allegiance.

This is not the time for petty enmities. We need crowds. We need anything that will help retain interest in our game which is about to be assaulted by more images of foreign football as BT compete with Sky, perhaps relegating the times of our fixtures into the same category as truck-pulling on ice. Could you blame them after cameras showed crowds this season which in too many instances barely merited the word quorum? We need to compete with the universal market and two major institutions going down the drain won't add to our chances.

Scottish football cannot go back on the decisions made over Rangers. But a new policy ought to be built around Hearts to keep them at the top level at all costs, albeit with attendant punishments. This would anger many but in reality would buttress the league in times of great financial need. Sadly the chances of that happening are as likely as exhuming the corpse of Third Lanark to investigate the flaws in Scottish football's DNA.