It is recorded in local Fife history that before the last war, in the magnificent Stevensonian lighthouse on the Isle of May, on Old Firm match days, the lighthouse-keeper and his wife, Jim and Frances, in the broad hall on the ground floor, would close the doors, take out a small ball and re-enact the fixture with an intensity of mongoose to snake.

He, Rangers. She, Celtic. The sound of kicking and screaming and the resultant bruises left on the poor lady, led the lighthouse keeper to be accused ,quite erroneously, of domestic abuse.

Barely anybody would believe that with great fidelity to the Old Firm tradition they were continuing to kick lumps out of each other whilst occasionally polishing the lamp that kept both ships and their marriage off the rocks.

It is worth recalling their vicarious pleasure, in trying to imagine what an actual title decider would have meant to them. They were long gone from their posts by 1967, which is just as well since, on May 6 of that year, Celtic went to Ibrox, not just to win a title, but to attempt to gain the first treble in their history. Had these two scrappers been around, on that day, the Isle of May might have ended up with a scenario made only for Poirot to solve.

For the title decider that year was one that induced the feeling of a global dimension, compared to Sunday's local scrap. Celtic heading for Lisbon. Rangers for Nuremburg. Two European finals in the offing; this game a mere preamble to possibly greater glory to come. And with it the even more intense corollary, the fear of defeat and the pain of the 'long walk home' as one Old Firm fan said to me approaching Ibrox that wet afternoon.

Although it could be argued that this was a golden period for the game in terms of European achievement, there was still the dreaded recurrence of sectarian violence affecting this fixture which pinned it to its parochial boundaries. There were so many arrests made normally in that era, that Inspector Joe Beattie was provoked to describe his Govan Police Station on match day, as 'an area of mass-subnormality'.

Yet on that afternoon, with 80,000 in the stadium, I recall no real apprehension, no sense that the nature of ebb and flow, punctuated by shuddering tackles, would incite a thrown punch, let alone a riot. Perhaps it was the fact that even more important games were still to come. Perhaps it was the incessant rain. For at half-time, looking down from my position in the press box, and seeing the scarred pitch, I did in fact think of the battlefield of Paschendaele.

Perhaps it was the nature of the scoring, with first Rangers in the lead then Celtic, it being a game of fight-back, thus inhibiting gloating. Perhaps it was because of the publicity given to special eyes watching on, lending it a new gloss. Sean Connery, the most famous Scot on the face of the earth, making a documentary on nearby Fairfields sat in the stand, stirred, not shaken by the spectacle.

Then there was the man in the shortie raincoat. Hellenio Herrera, coach of Inter Milan. I walked down Edmiston Drive with him just after he had been dropped off by car, surrounded by hordes of Celtic supporters, not seeking an explanation of catenaccio from him, but more or less dismissing him as a wee gnaff.

Indeed he did not look any more than he would turn out to be one of these men with a sandwich board with a message, particularly to those encircling him, reading, 'The End Is Nigh!'

What he saw inside could not have dulled his senses. The game was well balanced and needed something extraordinary to give it a final shape. The excellent first goal by a young Sandy Jardine, the quick equaliser by Jimmy Johnstone, then, near the end ,the scrappy, fighting equaliser by Roger Hynd, all were ingredients which came straight out of the Old Firm text-book of blow and counter-blow. But it was the third goal of the game which gave the afternoon its transcendence.

I rank Johnstone's goal in the 74th minute with Bobby Thomson's home run for the Giants against the Dodgers in 1971, 'The Shot Heard 'Round the World,' to win the World Series. Its singularity made it so. It seemed to come from a different dimension.

The pitch by that stage was primordial slime. To have sent that leaden lump of a ball any more than ten yards would have been an effort, but to have dispatched a shot, with his left-foot, from twenty-five yards into the roof of the Rangers net was in keeping with feats that Connery's script-writers would devise in helping him achieve the impossible on celluloid. This was for real. And although an equaliser was to follow you did feel that with only a draw required by the visitors, that single, searing moment had secured a title.

What followed on the final whistle was even more remarkable by the standards of carousing of the present age. There was no lapping up of triumph. Deep, restrained satisfaction, you could say. Mission accomplished. That's all. You could tell, as the Celtic players gave a sincere but perfunctory acknowledgement of their supporters, that they had Lisbon in mind.

Both sets of players trudged off the pitch, arms around their opponents, as if a draw had taken the sting out of the title defeat for the Rangers players, and as they also had a European final to face. That denouement was perhaps as significant as anything else. There and then, they were demonstrating that there were new priorities beyond the small fishpond that these two clubs believed could belong exclusively to them.

Yes, the title decider at Celtic Park on May 21 1979 when the home side with ten men came from a goal behind to win 4-2, and not recorded for posterity because of a television strike, also engulfed Celtic emotions.

As did the remarkable, incident strewn game at Parkhead on 2nd May 1999 for Rangers supporters, when for the first time in my career I had to describe a man falling from a stand, like he was a circus performer, and as Hugh Dallas was felled by coins, wondered, for the first time, if an Old Firm game would not be completed. Rangers were so superior, in every aspect, that their 3-0 victory, achieving their 10th league win in 11 years, was almost an act of benevolence.

Neither supporters nor players take kindly to lectures from the past, so Sunday's game will generate its own fervour. But the players might spare a tiny thought for that Ibrox '67 model, where if they cannot attain the same level of play, and sadly I am sure they cannot, they could at least borrow one of the most important aspects of that afternoon, mutual respect.

Enough respect to discourage such passions as were unleashed on that lighthouse on the Isle of May long ago.

It has been closed down now, by the way. They say for technological reasons. I suspect, though, that the SFA had a hand in that decision as well.