NOTHING stays niche for long these days. It would have been a different story had Marty and Doc hopped in their DeLorean in Back to the Future II and, rather unadventurously, set their clock for 1995 rather than 2015. When that date finally arrived it would have passed with little fanfare, save for a smattering of student movie screenings held, naturally, in a strictly ironic fashion.

There was no such luck this week. There is little subtlety about the social media age and so a topic has not been covered until it has been clubbed to death in the way cavemen used to arrange their dinner. And so last Wednesday, as the real date in the movie arrived, everyone was at it – government officials, the police, the Dalai Lama presumably – with tweets and Facebook posts about hoverboards, self-tying shoes and not driving at 88mph, all thinking they were the first to ever make that particular gag. By the end of the day there must have been more than a few wishing a time machine could take them back to the original Back to the Future film set in 1985 to beg the producers to ditch the entire blooming thing.

Scottish football, meanwhile, is about to experience its own form of time travel next summer when it fast-forwards to the past. Barring some kind of unforeseen Ibrox apocalypse, Rangers will be playing in the top division once more next season. Their downfall in 2012 – administration, liquidation, and the subsequent culture shock of being placed in the third division – was so seismic that it threatened to change a lot more than just Rangers’ timeline. This was a drama that would alter the face of the game forever, affecting great rivals Celtic, the rest of the top division teams, and Scottish football as a whole. Nothing would be the same again.

The reality, however, has been somewhat different. In fact, perhaps the only prediction to have emerged entirely unscathed was that the argument over whether Rangers are a new/the same club would have no expiration date. Were the Back to the Future franchise to return with another movie set in 2115 there would still be folk bickering endlessly over “Sevco” and its genesis.

That aside, though, how much will have really changed by the time Rangers are a Premiership club, presumably, for the start of 2016/17? Celtic were the obvious main beneficiaries of their old rivals’ demise, have duly won the three league titles contested without Rangers and will add a fourth this season. On top of that they have accrued such wealth over the past few years – both from transfer sales and their involvement in European competition – that they will hold a competitive financial advantage come the resumption of the duopoly next term.

And yet, it has not been all plain sailing for them either. They have failed to land the clean sweep their domestic dominance suggested was inevitable, have toiled in Europe in recent seasons, and find themselves in the midst of some serious soul-searching over manager Ronny Deila and the club’s transfer policy. An almost-guaranteed crack at reaching the Champions League every season should have given them a platform to evolve into an all-conquering force – Scottish football’s equivalent of Bayern Munich – but instead they remain riven by doubt and conflict. They will still be strongly fancied to win the championship next season even if Rangers return but it might not be as inevitable as could otherwise have been the case.

Alarmist talk - from those paid to promote the game, no less - of Armageddon in Scottish football and the game “withering on the vine” have mercifully also not come to pass. There have been others who have similarly stumbled into administration – due to excesses of their own past, rather than linked to Rangers’ fate - but none have gone to the wall despite previous scare stories of a landscape left devastated.

Rangers’ removal from the picture also created a vacuum for a new challenger to Celtic but we are no closer to seeing the Premiership title leave Glasgow as we were four years ago. Having just one rather than two sizeable forces to overcome has helped share the domestic cup trophies around – Kilmarnock, Hearts, St Mirren, St Johnstone, Aberdeen and Inverness Caledonian Thistle have all lifted silverware since Rangers went into administration – but, despite Aberdeen’s recent best efforts, there has been no easing of the league title out of Celtic’s grasp. There may not be a better chance.

The biggest change, then, may be Rangers themselves. They have taken notable strides forward on the pitch since Mark Warburton’s arrival as manager but there has been none of the wholesale investment alluded to by Dave King at the start of his chairmanship, while the looming court case over takeover deals will serve as another distraction. In their ongoing quest to try to get things back to how they used to be, however, at least the rest of Scottish football continues to deliver a dose of familiarity.