When a team’s realistic finishing window is anywhere between fourth top and second bottom with only eight games left, one could hardly call the remaining matches insignificant.
So it is extremely unusual – virtually unprecedented, indeed, since the introduction of transfer windows a generation ago – that Aberdeen’s squad is not being led on the final approach to that crossroads between Europe and relegation by the captain appointed at the journey’s outset.
Whatever was remaining on his personal fuel gauge, it is hard to think of plausible excuses for the man anointed as the squad’s leader not to be around it, in any form, just as the stakes reach their highest.
There are only two broad possibilities and neither reflect well on the player.
Either he did not wish to contribute further to the cause in a time of need, or he could not be persuaded to do so in the capacity now required by the club which paid his wages.
Whichever, it is to as good as admit that the destiny of Aberdeen’s season was allowed to be subordinated to one individual’s career development, a process in which the club has been equally complicit from the word go.
Whichever of the disparate range of possibilities transpires to be its fate, this will not have been a season to be cherished by Aberdeen.
There can be no doubt that its standing in the Scottish game has taken a step back, and that it has been the ill-considered architect of its own demise.
But it moves on now with only those, in the main, who want to be here, and it showed in a determined and aggressive performance.
They may have been helped by beefcake caricature Ryan Porteous, but at least they not only waved him on his habitual way – they beat those he left behind.