To those of us who were around in the 1990s, fixtures between Aberdeen and Partick Thistle will always bring back memories of one thing in particular: a clapped-out sweeping brush.

It was in late 1992 that a rampant Aberdeen side, in the midst of what would become a 14-match unbeaten run in which they would score a ridiculous 45 goals, travelled to Firhill on the kind of afternoon which ought to have seen an early postponement. The pitch completely white – along with the Dons’ away kit and the ball – the farce of the situation was summed up in the opening goal, when Eoin Jess was able to slip over, pick himself up, and still have time to plough the ball into the net before any of the Jags defenders was able to luge across the penalty area to stop him. Not that anybody could be entirely sure that they actually were in the penalty area, every line on the playing surface being buried beneath an inch of snow.

And here is where the infamous broom entered the fray. The match having somehow slithered its way to half time without being called off on safety grounds, it was felt that, despite the huge flakes continuing to tumble down from a sky showing no sign of running empty, an orange ball and a janitor with a carpet brush would suffice to see us through. So out traipsed a solitary soul with a windcheater and a broom, set the Herculean task of clearing the lines with a utensil intended for no more strenuous use than dispensing Ray Farningham’s moustache clippings from the dressing room floor.

It is likely that nobody has ever bothered to perform the calculation before, and clearly not whoever gave the order for sweeper despatch, but the total length of the markings delineating a football field is very nearly half a mile. Even sticking to the bare essentials of the pitch perimeter, halfway and the two penalty areas, that is a grand total of 613 yards’ worth of snow which would have required to be shifted in order to render the exercise worthwhile, all in the space of a fifteen minute interval. Bless the Thistle groundsman if he truly thought he was up to the task, but his eye was considerably bigger than his broom.

And so, in unforgettably comic scenes, the brave broomsman inched along for approximately a quarter the length of the halfway line – albeit with a noticeably defective technique placing far too much stress on the handle joint – before the head of his brush gave up the ghost and detached itself from the stick; classically, the undeterred caretaker would make a vain bodge of shoving the handle back in, but not a flake more would it move before the bristles broke off again. The match, complete with eccentrically semi-visible halfway line, would briefly resume, but like the broom it would not last long before the inevitable become unignorable. The referee should never have permitted the game to go ahead and there was nothing, even with 100 brooms, poor Partick could have done to change that.

The doleful scene remains to this day something of an allegory of Scottish football as a whole. Despite the prevailing conditions shouting loudly and clearly that proceeding with business as usual is doomed to fail, despite experience proving that our approach is wrong and our technique deficient, we carry on regardless. When the game’s head falls off we do not take it as a cue to try something fresh and different; we simply pick it off the cold icy floor and attempt to force it back into place, presuming that all will then be right with the world. But when there is half a mile of snow ahead and it’s still dinging down, to expect as much is dense in the extreme.