What can be taken from Saints' semi-final exit?

[BBC]

St Mirren's unlikely run to the penultimate stage of a second cup competition in a season, all while toiling on league duty, kept dreams alive of something spectacular until almost the very end.

Celtic's four-goal blitz in six extra time minutes delivered a scoreline that will tell one tale, and justifiably so, but the conclusion from a Saints perspective has yet to be written.

In a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style, there are many paths this performance and result may lead down. Glasses can be half full, or half empty, or angrily tossed across a dressing room during a play-off.

Mika Mandron, nearly, had his finest hour in a Saints jersey. His first goal was a sublimely-placed header, earned by the kind of movement that defines his reign as the club's number nine.

Denied his guaranteed cup final start by illness, knocked down by a calamitous first half of defensive error and injury, Mandron grabbed the occasion by the collar in the second half and had his say.

Burying his equalising volley beyond Viljami Sinisalo and darting for the bedlam of Hampden's South Stand, the Frenchman with Scottish ties looked very much at home in the national stadium.

In an optimistic world, the Saints leading man takes this evidence of standing up when it counts and runs riot for the five remaining league fixtures that will decide his club's immediate future.

Grant Tamosevicius, born the week after Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party's nomination for President, started this month as an academy keeper fourth in the queue for time between the Buddies' sticks.

Within 15 minutes of Sunday's semi-final, he was thrust into senior action for the first time in front of a national audience and packed crowd. Celtic's third goal aside, where the youngster was only as caught out by the cross as the two experienced centre-halves in front of him, Tamosevicius held his own.

With Shamal George visibly injured in the stands, Ryan Mullen now awaiting results and Peter Urminsky blocked by both loan arrangement and his own injury nightmare, the debutant's unexpected starring role may yet continue and with the stakes only increasing.

For Craig McLeish, the challenge is now single-minded and straightforward: Keep St Mirren in the top division.

The interim has a choice of tone to make and all indications are he has forged ahead with the positives. A side that no one backed, that injury decimated and that calamity befell, pushed Scotland's richest side to the brink of a second Hampden defeat in four months.

It is hard to legislate for the kind of unfortunate error and injury that plunged the Saints into chaos early on Sunday, or for the extra-time collapse of a side on their last legs and altered to chase an equaliser at all costs.

What can be taken from his side's showing are the resilience, grit, confidence and refusal to die that kept cup double dreams alive until the very last.

This is a St Mirren team that believe in their ability, in their mental fortitude and in the direction they have been asked to take.

This is a side built to take chances, pass with courage and change games on their own terms. Frankly, after four years of doing their best work in the table-topping games where possession was an alien concept, this is a team now drilled to want the ball and be masters of their own fate.

This season's story already had the momentous high of second act silverware, with the scene now set for third act redemption too.

Mark Jardine can be found at Misery Hunters