One word was repeated time and again in the gut-wrenching minutes following Celtic's desperately cruel last-minute defeat to Barcelona at Camp Nou: brave.
What a brave display of bravery that couldn't have been braver had brave John Terry been fighting a bear. In fact, it was a minor miracle that Sky's closing credits didn't mock up Scott Brown as Mel Gibson in Braveheart, blue paint slapped on his face and shaking his bum at his enemies before Jordi Alba supplied the metaphorical arrow to the arse.
Until that late, late goal it had been a fantastic performance from Celtic on a night when Scottish football looked set to record one of its greatest European results of the past decade. Resolute? Hugely. Determined? Absolutely. Heroic? Arguably. Fortunate? Probably. But brave? Well, not exactly.
Bravery against Barcelona is to go out all guns blazing and try and take them on at their own game. Suicidal, yes, but undoubtedly brave in a 'Charge of the Light Brigade', inviting a massacre kind of way.
What Celtic did was actually entirely sensible. Getting men behind the ball in an attempt to deny Barcelona space and then snatching a goal from a set-piece is basically the only way to try and combat those tremendously cultured Catalans. Most times it doesn't work, but every so often a team will get lucky. This doesn't require a particular brand of bravery - it is deeply pragmatic.
But still the process of patronising Celtic begun even before their broken set of players trudged off the pitch at Camp Nou, their heads clutched in their hands after Alba's goal with 30 seconds remaining saw them defeated.
The words 'brave' and 'plucky' - the latter of which, like 'bust-up' or 'showdown talks', only ever seems to apply to football - were thrown around with abandon, fitting as they did the pre-prescribed narrative when a weaker team tackles one of the best. We even had extensive debate about whether Celtic players - professional players mind - would be more concerned about arranging shirt swaps than doing their job.
But to reduce their performance to a concept as flimsy as mere bravery did Celtic a disservice, suggesting that their ability to almost hold Barcelona to a draw was merely a near triumph of the will, of good old British passion.
It was that, but it was also a near triumph of tactical discipline, of positional awareness and of technical excellence in and around their own penalty area.
The expert timing of Efe Ambrose's tackles could not be attributed to bravery alone, and neither could the performance of the exceptional Fraser Forster in goal, as he made all manner of saves to prevent Lionel Messi from scoring his 300th career goal, even if he could not prevent Andres Iniesta and Alba from turning around Celtic's improbable lead given to them by the equally improbable figure of Georgios Samaras.
It wasn't bravery that made him fling out his left arm to expertly parry a Messi header in the second half - the pick of his eight saves - it was technique and ability, allied to a bit of muscle memory.
In fact, Forster admirably refused to go along with the narrative that Celtic were merely fortunate just to be on the same pitch as Barca. When asked whether it was "the best of nights as well as the worst" by Sky, he replied: "Definitely the worst."
So arguably a bad night for Celtic, ultimately, yet a fine one for football north of the border. It is only a matter of months since harbingers of doom predicted the death of Scottish football when Rangers were demoted to the fourth tier following the club's rather spectacular bankruptcy and implosion.
It was said Celtic would shrivel up without the competition provided by their enemies in Glasgow yet, having won at Spartak Moscow for their first ever away win in the Champions League group stage, here they were within 30 seconds of taking a point off arguably the best team on the planet. They even prevented Messi from scoring at Camp Nou - an achievement bordering on remarkable given his strike-rate on home turf.
Manager Neil Lennon recognised that Celtic's performance had a wider significance. He said: "I thought the team were magnificent. It is bittersweet really, it is hard to take losing the game in the manner in which we did but I am so proud of the players, I think they gave the club and country a huge shot in the arm. There is a mixture of disappointment and anger that we didn't see it through to the end of the game. The players are hurting, they are angry, whatever you want to call it but it gave them a real a taste of playing in the Champions League at the highest level and they played fantastically well."
Lennon also succumbed to describing his players as "brave" - and they were, to an extent at least. But the defining characteristic of what was almost one of Celtic's great European nights was something a bit more than just bravery. It was ability too.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "We didn't play well and it is a shock following some good performances in the Champions League. Sometimes you can't play well, tonight was that. I don't know why we were so poor. Shakhtar played really intelligently and didn't give us the opportunities to win the game. We have now only won one game in the Champions League this season. Congratulations to Shakhtar. Now we have to think about the next game." - Chelsea's David Luiz appears shell-shocked after losing to a side that have now won 32 of their past 34 competitive games.
FOREIGN VIEW: "I am angry for the result and the way we conceded the goal. We conceded a very avoidable free kick on the edge of the box and that was frankly the only way they could possibly score against us. The free kick was perfect and I couldn't do anything about it. The first half was balanced, but after the break there was only one team on the field. Never more than tonight was the result down to a single incident." - Gianluigi Buffon was clearly miffed by Juventus' 1-1 draw with Nordsjaelland on Tuesday night - the Old lady's ninth draw in 10 European matches.
COMING UP: We have a second night of Champions League action for you to enjoy. Zenit v Anderlecht is the early kick-off at 5pm before Arsenal v Schalke and Ajax v Manchester City head up the 7.45pm games. We will be covering them all live of course. Before that, we put Liverpool's Raheem Sterling Under the Microscope, while Jim White files his latest blog and we open up our Goal of the Week competition to a public vote.