THIS is a particular chapter of Rangers' history that could only ever have ended one way: in failure, humiliation, anger and disgrace.
The directors who laid its flimsy, dissolving foundations have long since headed off into the night, no doubt busying themselves with 'opportunities' at other companies at the distressed end of the market. Most of the players will now be heading for the exit door, too, and one can only guess which kind of places they may end up.
Bilel Mohsni is one of them. Should there, heaven forbid, prove to be an absence of clubs queueing up for his services, word has it there is a few quid to be made in cage fighting these days.
His left hook on Lee Erwin at full-time, infinitely more impressive than anything he has managed with a ball in Scotland, was the perfect sign-off to this most appalling of campaigns for the Glasgow club, an organisation that has found itself infested with people who never had any right to be there and lacking any kind of standards whatsoever.
Charging off the team bus to try and get at Erwin again outside Fir Park a full hour after the final whistle just serves as further evidence of a club that has lost its way completely.
The shambles of the past four years has left them facing another season in the SPFL Championship. It is a complete disaster for a business in desperate need of meaningful income and should not be dressed up any other way.
Rangers is a club which somehow managed to burn its way through a figure in excess of £70m during a wholly undignified period spent trawling around the lower reaches of Scottish football. Plenty of people got rich over the course of that time and many of them were floundering around in blue on the pitch at Fir Park yesterday.
Rangers, never let it be forgotten, completed this God-awful campaign with easily the second largest wage bill in the game. That this is the best they were capable of getting for that degree of investment, whilst completely ignoring every other element of the footballing infrastructure, deserves an investigation of FIFA proportions in itself.
All the chickens certainly came home to roost over 180 minutes against a Motherwell team that could barely buy a win over the latter half of the season. Rangers were fortunate to get away with a 3-1 defeat in the opening leg at Ibrox and fell apart completely during a quite shameful afternoon in Lanarkshire.
The nature of the goal that killed off any last, remaining hope of an ill-deserved promotion - a shot from Marvin Johnson in the 52nd minute that spun off Marius Zaliukas and was dealt with by Cammy Bell in the way a drunk man might flap at a seagull homing in on his sausage supper - was fitting. It was, like almost everything else at Ibrox, messy and embarrassing.
Someone threw a flare onto the park in the immediate aftermath. Away supporters who had infiltrated the Main Stand made for the exits, becoming involved in heated arguments with the Motherwell fans around them. Their faces were arguably redder than the smoke bomb and had almost as much steam coming off them.
Stuart McCall, who did his best with the broken and disjointed collection of players inherited from Ally McCoist and Kenny McDowall, could do little on the touchline other than listen to the locals, people with whom he once shared a special bond, chanting: "You're getting sacked in the morning". How things have changed since the days he charged around the Rangers midfield on the way to winning a ninth consecutive championship.
Rangers have dragged so many people down, though. Kris Boyd is the perfect example. In an act that reeked of desperation, he was handed a rare start and did little of note before being replaced by Nicky Clark on 59 minutes.
For all that, Rangers offered even less when he was sitting in the dug-out, stumbling around like an injured bull waiting for a matador to brandish the knife and end the misery.
Rather like an afternoon in the bullring, we ended up with some horses on the pitch as well. After Mohsni had gone into the kind of meltdown he has long threatened, the Motherwell support staged a pitch invasion and had to be returned to their pens with the aid of mounted police.
It was a surreal and ludicrous way to end what has been a surreal and ludicrous "journey" for Rangers, at least.
There is a new board in place now, of course. There will soon be a new team. It is difficult to offer any positives to them other than to say they will all have to go some to make things worse.
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