It is, granted, the kind of panic which any of the three managers to precede Jimmy Thelin during 2024 would have been only too happy to experience. All the same, these have now become alarming times for Aberdeen.
It would be pushing it to say that there was an inevitability to the gut-punch ending, but the last goal of the Premiership year was definitely not its most surprising.
After their recent travails Aberdeen often looked like young lambs trying to find their feet, and the exertion of carrying themselves with such concentrated control caused many tired bodies to crumple to the turf in the minutes leading up to the dénouement.
For much of the evening, it almost appeared that the Dons’ primary objective was to simply be competitive, or to prove to themselves after their previous two outings that they could be.
A battling draw would have done substantial remedial work on fractured confidence.
The fates, though, rarely work that way. Teams clutching at a straw will usually find it washed away, and in the most excruciatingly functional way imaginable, Aberdeen watched theirs bob overhead and out of their grasp.
At the start of November it would have been impossible to project that Aberdeen would bring in the new year at so low an ebb as they now do.
Then, clear blue water separated them and Celtic from the rest of the league; now they sit potentially just one game away from sliding to fourth.
On the mean of the season’s first two quarters it is fair that they remain slightly above yesterday’s victors, but, outside of pandemics, league positions are not decided on average. Points must continue to be earned match after match; that is now coming dangerously harder to the Dons than to the teams directly beneath them.
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