EVERY Rangers fan must be dreading the 15th day of the 11th month in this Year of Grace 2015. For on that day, Rangers will notch up a very unwanted modern record.

On November 15, it will become Rangers’ longest period without a major Scottish trophy in the post-war era – sorry, but the lower league titles don’t cut it. They have not gone without the top League flag, Scottish Cup or League Cup for as long a period as this since the Jock Stein-induced drought of the late 1960s when Celtic ruled the roost and Rangers went from April 23, 1966, to October 24, 1970, without winning any of the domestic big three.

So why make a fuss? The accepted wisdom is that the Rangers supporters will just turn up and pay their way as usual, but will they do so if the club doesn’t win anything this season?

Just as successful businessmen tend to lose their business acumen the minute they become directors of the football club they have supported all their lives, so do ordinary football fans often lose their capacity for sensible thinking when it comes to their clubs.

Take Rangers, for instance. When all the putrid machinations – the tax ‘avoidance’, the arrogant colossal profligacy – over many years by the Ibrox ‘Murraytocracy’ led to the era of total chancers such as Craig Whyte and Charles Green and their cohorts, all Rangers fans should have cried “enough is enough” and taken up Tai Chi or Tiddlywinks of a Saturday afternoon.

Yet they didn’t. Against the dictates of common sense, Rangers FC remains the second-best supported club in the country in terms of bums on seats. Despite the abject failure of last season, the club is selling plenty season tickets, and may yet surpass last season’s total of 28,000, which proves that new chairman Dave King is at least talking a good game.

He will need to spend plenty and seems to be doing so, but he is apparently making more money in South Africa than ever before – and paying his taxes, too.

Think about it for even a few minutes and you would have to conclude that Rangers being out of the top flight for four years should logically have seen their support wither to nothing. But no – though I wish more of them would forget 1690 and all that, and I detested some of their anti-Salmond ditties at referendum time, I have to admit to admiring the fact that Rangers supporters by and large have kept their club going with their devotion and, yes, their money.

It’s a crazy situation that defies all those theories about market forces and consumer demand about which economists love to lecture us. But that’s football fans for you – who said devotion to any club must be logical?

Their fans’ loyalty is unquestioned but unless Rangers prosper this season, even the most diehard Rangers supporter will surely have doubts about spending his or her hard-earned cash on a club that is a pale shadow of what it once was in its glory days.

(Don’t bother the usual anonymous Celtic trolls giving me all that Sevco stuff, because this club is the same Rangers that was founded in 1872. Or else why do you get your knickers in a twist about it? Would you do the same about Hibs, founded as Hibernians but reborn as Hibernian FC in 1892 after ceasing to exist for a year? No, thought not. Sevco is just another excuse for a pathetic display of tribalistic gloating, and a good joke has become a bit wearisome. Rangers FC’s owners did disgusting, horrendous and cheating things, but after what will be at least four years of lower league football, it’s safe to say the club has been adequately punished, so let’s move on, please.)

It could be argued that every season since 2012 has been Rangers’ most momentous season ever as the survival struggle went on, but in one sense 2015/16 gets that award.

Another season out of the top flight would be beyond disastrous for Rangers, and even their long-suffering fans would surely start to doubt whether it is all worth the candle and the cash.

The task for Mark Warburton and David Weir is simple. Rangers must win the Championship – forget the Cups, the league is everything. Coming second is not an option as the play-off fiasco against Motherwell in May showed that this route to promotion cannot be guaranteed to work.

It will not be easy for numerous reasons, four of them by the name of St Mirren, Hibs, Falkirk and Queen of the South, though Morton and Raith Rovers could be tricky, too.

Rangers did well on Saturday to beat a very unsettled Hibs 6-2 in the Challenge Cup, and it’s a good marker for the season. The real test, I feel, will come in the opening match of the Championship against St Mirren, and in case their optimism is too high, the Ibrox fans need only recall what happened in the opening game of last season when relegated Hearts came to Glasgow and won 2-1.

St Mirren also went behind on Saturday before beating Berwick Rangers 3-1, so presumably the Paisley side is in relatively good nick and in Ian Murray, they have a manager of outstanding potential.

It’s not a must-win match against the Buddies on August 7, but for Rangers, this surely is a must-win season, otherwise even their loyal fans might start to have serious collywobbles.