Sport and Leisure Swifts play their final game of football this evening.
Rather than with the lure of survival at stake, there’s now little more than pride to play for.
More than 40 years after founding, the Glen Road outfit will be no more come full-time tonight.
As dusk falls, so too will the curtain on the West Belfast club who are to become Belfast Celtic in a joint move with Donegal Celtic.
Where that new club will be playing remains the biggest question, though.
Saturday’s results elsewhere, with Armagh City beating Annagh United, meant there was to be no Easter salvation for Pat McAllister’s side.
Instead they must complete their fixtures knowing that their fate is sealed.
But chairman Jim Gillen told Match On Tuesday: “Relegation doesn’t affect our plans in any way.
“We have four or five options available to us and we’re keeping them all open. Nothing has been decided.
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“We will sit down as Belfast Celtic and make the decision which is best for the club.
“We’ll look to make that decision as soon as we can, ideally next week. We’re frustrated with the way it has finished this season but the less said about that the better probably.
“However, we’ve a few things which we will announce shortly and a decision will soon be made on which league we will play in next season.”
In the end, despite a late rally, the Swifts ran out of games.
Just four wins all season, one of those coming last week at Portstewart to give them a shot at survival, tells its own story.
They outscored a number of other teams – Newington, Armagh City and Lurgan Celtic – but it was the 60 conceded which ultimately cost them their place in the division.
Twenty-seven of those goals came in a disastrous six-game spell in February and March which sent them bottom of the table from where they would never recover.
But stats don’t always tell the full story.
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That run coincided with Sport and Leisure being deprived of a large portion of their first- choice side due to suspensions, ultimately leaving them out in the cold.
But Gillen insists the final Swifts run-out will be contested in the right spirit when they welcome Lisburn Distillery to the hills above Belfast at 7pm tonight.
He added: “It will be a strange night and one of mixed emotions but things have to progress. “We have to take what has happened on the chin and move forward.
“In some ways this game will feel like an exhibition match but we will contest it in the right spirit and try to win it.
“It’s been a very difficult season and it goes back to around the time we announced the name change.
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“We were given bans totalling 32 games – we lost our goalkeeper for eight games, two centre- halves for six games and two centre-midfielders for six games.
“There isn’t a team in the country who could cope with that.
“It’s no coincidence that the results and performances improved when we got the players back on the pitch.
“Unfortunately it came too late for us to be able to get the results we needed to stay up.
“We would also have liked the opportunity for the final game of the season to be played at the same time as others in the same situation but, in their powers, they decided against that.
“And, as I say, the less said about that decision the better.”
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