OF all the Rangers players who declined to “do walking away” from Ibrox back in the dark days of 2012, Lee Wallace was perhaps the most surprising.

The left back was just 24 and had been capped six times by Scotland when the Glasgow institution’s financial fecklessness caught up with it.

Why, many in the game asked, would he spend several years of what is a short career playing in the lower leagues and jeopardise his international future in the process in order to stay?

Wallace could quite easily have moved on, as the majority of his team mates chose to do, plied his trade at a higher level and remained involved in the national set-up.

The single-minded individual, though, has never, not when Rangers were suffering ignominious draws and defeats to part-time rivals and not when their steady rise to the top flight stalled last season, had cause to regret his decision.

He will certainly feel vindicated by his stance when he leads Mark Warburton’s team out in the William Hill Scottish Cup final to face Hibs in front of a crowd of more than 50,000 at Hampden this afternoon.

Victory for Rangers, who have already won the Ladbrokes Championship and Petrofac Training Cup in the 2015/16 campaign, would complete what would be an unprecedented domestic treble.

It would be an important milestone for a club desperately striving to establish itself as a major force in Scottish football and secure a place in Europe after years of boardroom mismanagement and corporate vandalism - not to mention for Wallace himself personally.

“You visualise these things,” he said. “You look to moments like this in your career. You’ve done so since you were a little boy and you do so as a player. We have obviously been blessed in terms of the season we’ve already had. It’s been a good season, but if all goes well, we can turn it into a great season.

“It (victory) means the world. We are aware of everything that is at stake in terms of Hibs and their history (the Easter Road club have gone 114 years without winning the Scottish Cup).

“But we are also aware of what we can do in terms of the journey for the guys who have been there, suffered the drop, been part of the process to get us back to where we should be playing. We have managed to do that, we have got the Petrofac along the way and we can now make it a really great season if all goes well.”

The success which Rangers, who defeated their city rivals Celtic on penalties in a classic semi-final encounter at Hampden last month, have enjoyed under Warburton this season has come of little surprise to Wallace.

An aspiring manager who has coached at both Heriot Vale and Tynecastle FC in his home city of Edinburgh, he recognised what was possible soon after the former City of London trader was appointed last summer.

“I started to generate that belief when the manager first spoke to us,” he said. “After suffering the disappointment we did last year, it quickly turned to looking forward to things again and looking forward to what can be.

“Cup finals naturally are going to be part of that, especially the Scottish Cup. We managed to do that this season with the Petrofac. We were expected to go and do well and we managed to deliver.

“I am not sure we were expected to win the Scottish Cup. A lot of questions came about after the St Johnstone result (Rangers lost to the Perth club in the League Cup). There were questions whether we could play this style of play against Premiership opposition. But we have been able to do that on three occasions since that.

“We know in house what our goal was at the start of the season. Of course it would be a dream for everyone in the dressing room to cap off what would become a great season. It is certainly one we are confident of, but we are aware of their threat as well.”

Indeed they are. Rangers and Hibs have squared up to each other on no fewer than five occasions this season - with the former winning three of their meetings and the latter prevailing in two.

For a while, the Edinburgh and Glasgow clubs were locked together at the top of the Championship table and Alan Stubbs directed some subtle and some not-so-subtle digs towards Warburton.

Stubbs’s carefully-considered remarks about the difficulty of his counterpart’s job, the enviable size of his budget and the pressure his players were under, however, have dried up of late as his side’s bid to win promotion has floundered and failed.

Wallace stresses it didn’t affect any of the Rangers players at the time the phoney war was being waged in the media and is of little concern to them now hostilities have ceased.

“We were aware of that,” he said. “We were aware of the articles, the press conferences, of certain aspects of the media and the mind games. But we were focused on what we had to do. It never got to any of us.”

Rangers have gone three weeks without a competitive game since their final Championship game of the season against St. Mirren on May 1.

Whether that will put them at an advantage or disadvantage to Hibs, who have been involved in two intense play-off semi-final matches against Falkirk during the same period, will become apparent this afternoon.

“It’s been a different challenge for us, but the manager put together a really good programme that we used well,” said Wallace. “It gave us an opportunity to rest for a few days which helped nurse a few bumps and bruises.

"We came back hard the following week and we got a really good, hard technical game down at Spurs that was such a worthwhile exercise.”

The former Hearts defender knows all about the demands on Hibs to end a barren run in the Scottish Cup that stretches back to 1902. He expects their play-off semi-final defeat to Falkirk will simply have strengthened their resolve round off their season with an historic triumph.

But the 28-year-old believes if Rangers perform, as they have done in the last three rounds of the cup against Premiership opponents Kilmarnock, Dundee and Celtic, he will lift what will be the first major piece of silverware of his playing days.

“We are expecting Hibs to try and rectify the disappointment of not getting promoted to the top flight,” he said. “We are aware of that, aware of the games we have played against them in the past. We know it is two good teams that like to play football the right way. We know it will be a difficult game.

“But if we hit our levels then we know what will happen in the game. It is up to us to do that. We have said it on a number of occasions, we have managed to show it on a number of occasions and on this last occasion it is about going out and doing it. We feel in that dressing room that if we hit our level of performance we will fine in the game.”