Now that so much raw emotion has been unleashed on the subject of Murray and Whyte's re-enactment of Burke and Hare, delivering a slowly decomposing corpse to the scalpels of the club's detractors, I realise that my admission to being an Old Firm junkie who cannot envisage life without that special 'fix' might be considered an endorsement of depravity.

That is simply what the addict has to face up to: bearing the odium of those who know they would not need to employ the forensic skills of Robert Jay QC to expose this fixture as a corruption of civilised behaviour. Case closed, they would say.

Now I have been lectured often on the subject and even though I profess to living as close as humanly possible to the strictures of the Good Book, and am only at odds with that bit about how fruit was so bad for us in the Garden of Eden but so good for us now, I am surrounded by doubters of my character whenever I rank that game as the nutrient without which Scottish football would sag into a kind of Icelandic league without the benefits of hot-springs and geysers.

This admission stems principally from my experience in 1980 when, looking down on the pitch at the tribal mayhem after the Scottish Cup final between the two, as the hordes clashed, white horses roamed the Hampden range and bottles flew like Exocets, I suddenly became aware that my words of condemnation – with, admittedly, some trite moralising – could, in effect, be adding to the ammunition of those who would want to see, there and then, these encounters end.

Already I was feeling scary withdrawal symptoms. Here was an institution that up till then had seemed too big to fail, so entrenched to be uprooted, and apparently protected by both sides in their use of embellished anecdote that tried to elevate the fixture to some transcendental phenomenon. My head had been swayed by such.

On one occasion, for instance, I was privileged to be addressed by a gentleman who hailed from Dennistoun, in a bar in Kearney, New Jersey. With the aid of much Jack Daniels and a little of American history, he related the famous Cox-Tully kicking incident of 1949 to the Rights of Man and quoted Thomas Paine to me, 'Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered'. I chose not to belittle that analogy as I feared I would have Marx thrown back at me. But for a junkie like me this was the stuff that dreams are made of. Recollections of past games, woven into the threads of other issues, providing a tapestry that no other sporting event could match. Wha daur meddle wi' that?

And then came that final where I did think that society would tolerate no more of this. In the immediate aftermath it seemed the government would be minded to end it all, until reality seeped in and the logistics of permanently separating the two seemed mere fantasy. But the thought did not desert me that possibly the circumstances might arise which would make such an outcome entirely feasible. These, apparently, have now arrived.

To the addict, that is alarming. Let us assume that tomorrow's game will be the last approaching some kind of parity in the respective strengths of the clubs, and depending on how the latest Paul Murray/Brian Kennedy bid pans out. Rangers will, thereafter, either be absent from the Scottish Premier League or so emasculated as to be merely the Glenbuck Cherrypickers of that same division, if allowed to remain. To all intents and purposes the Old Firm tradition would have ended.

There would be one winner permanently, either in the fixture itself or of the league in general. Those in the Celtic family would feel they had attained a state of Nirvana, minus the anxiety and pain of the possibility of defeat. But isn't it that possibility which brought the best out of Celtic in the past? Wasn't it the raison d'etre of Jock Stein who, amid all the considerations, including Europe, said that beating Rangers was his primary objective in life. Ask Billy McNeill. That was the dynamic that created the nine-in-a-row phase in an age when Rangers had admirable teams. Minus their great rivals, Celtic, of course, could easily exist within a comfort zone that would only be threatened by complacency. But would it equip them to make the quantum leap from what would inevitably be a more parochial and less competitive league for them to a European level which is where they really want to distinguish themselves?

Consider the dazzling European semi-finals of this week and you end up with a sore head contemplating the difference in quality. Look at the past recent record of both clubs, and on the one hand reaching the qualification stage for Europe would potentially be easier for Celtic, but, actually qualifying, credibly more difficult. In a diminished league that first hurdle could increasingly assume the proportions of Becher's Brook.

Not that that in itself would initially matter to the clubs outside Glasgow who, according to the language on the websites, seem to be in a 'Sink The Bismark' mood, with the obvious target Ibrox. Their idea is fairness for all. You can't argue against that. But what about quality? That is the only factor which will cause Scottish football to endure in a highly competitive and now indispensable television market.

Despite the egregious nature of either club's domination of the league, which has admittedly sucked the interest out of many provincial supporters, you don't revive it by simply shoving one club to the fringes of the game. If they have been guilty of transgressions that is where they deserve to end up. But it would be foolish to anticipate a renaissance in the nature of Scottish football simply by enacting that.

So fairness overall and sporting integrity, all wrapped up with pink-bows, will never allay the need for the 'fix', even though its origins seem mundane. For it all started on May 28, 1888, when 2000 turned up to see the first Old Firm game. According to reports, the players retired to a local hall, where they shared tea and engaged in some harmonious singing.

Little could they realise that from such a harmless tableaux would emerge a powerful and perhaps illicit drug that would make me one of its many victims and for which I feel no shame.