IF anything should alert the Scottish football fan to the fact that the international break is over - presuming that he has been drunk and forgotten - it is opening up a newspaper to read about how Hearts are going to win the SPL.
Hearts have, of course, been crowing on about how they are going to win the SPL, followed by the Champions League and, lord knows, the war on terror, since 2005. Traditionally such pronouncements have come direct from Vladimir Romanov, the blustering little plutocrat who owns the club and everything to do with it, but things have moved on.
Like Soviet farmers whose crop of potatoes is always greater than last year's, this while the hungry proletariat can't grass up their neighbours for a bag of Glorious Five Year Plan Maris Pipers, the Lithuanian seems to have started trusting his players to stay on message.
Thursday, therefore, gave us this from Laryea Kingston: "My aim is to win the Premier League with Hearts, and to go on and win a European title with them." And then on Friday, Robbie Neilson, obviously determined that he too should avoid exile, let loose on the unacceptability of Hearts not being top of the league and playing in the Champions League.
This curious sleight of mind may also drag up the past, or at least the re-written version. At the start of this campaign it was revealed not only that Hearts were going to win the SPL, but that they were going to win it "back" from the Old Firm. It does not take a Hibernian fan, and I am not one, to point out that the last time Hearts won a league title was 1959-60, and even Kilmarnock have won one since then.
Hearts supporters have every reason to feel decidedly uneasy, not to mention murderous with rage, regardless of whether or not they beat Dundee United yesterday. Mr Romanov has, lest we forget, so far sold any Hearts player of any market value and trousered the proceeds, filled the biggest squad of players in the land with migrants from sundry recently-liberated Eastern European countries - regardless of ability - and put the club ever further into debt in order to pay their wages, the while his Lithuanian bank makes a tidy sum in interest off same debt.
Unless those supporters are stupid enough to believe that the next time Hearts lose - and these people exist - that it is the fault of the press, who are trying to "unbalance" the club, they will remain uneasy and murderous until Hearts either win the Champions League and stop global terror in its tracks, or Romanov gets tired of making money out of them and goes off to look for a new Third Lanark.
You heard it here first. Hearts are not going to win the SPL.
This article appeared in the Sunday Herald