Alistair Johnston gets Celtic penalty pain perspective from fellow newlywed as key question answered
It was a summer of mixed emotions for Alistair Johnston.
An agonising penalty miss at Hampden handed Aberdeen the Scottish Cup and ended Celtic's Treble dreams in the cruellest fashion.
For Johnston, it wasn't the way the season was supposed to finish. Especially not with the biggest day of his life around the corner as he prepared to marry his long-term partner Peyton.
It can take weeks to get a defeat like that out of the system. Especially when it's usually Celtic doing the celebrating on the podium.
But after a heart-to-heart with close pal and ex-teammate Greg Taylor, it wasn't long before newlywed Johnston was smiling again.
He said: 'I talked actually a lot to Greg about it because he had done something similar the year before.
"He had his wedding the week following the cup final. I asked him, 'Does a result kind of really affect the wedding?'.
"He's like, 'Look, once the season's done and you're fully focused on your wedding, it's the biggest day of your life'. It's exactly that.
"Once I got there, saw my friends, family I pretty quickly forgot about football. You remember that there are still more important things in life, your family, your wife.
"It was nice to kind of put the failure of that cup final behind me and kind of really just reset, focus on the people that were there and then get ready for the internationals.
"Once we got through that tournament, I remembered, 'Okay, we've got something to come back and try and win back when I get back into Scotland'.
"So I think there's an extra level of motivation now. You can see it through the entire group.
"There's definitely a bit of a burning passion there to get back what we think is our trophy. So that's something that we have a challenge of this year.'
Now entering his third full season at Celtic Park, Johnston has already racked up an incredible seven trophies - including a Treble and back-to-back Doubles.
But the Canada international - who helped his country reach the quarter-finals of the Gold Cup - is determined to make amends this season.
He said: 'If you never lose, then you kind of forget what the feeling of winning really is.
"I want to sit here and say that I want to win every single trophy. That is the case.
"But, at the same time, when you do lose one you probably come back with a bit more of a fire in your belly to go out there and really kick on that following year.
"So I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing. It is in the past. Obviously, we would have loved to have won a treble. It didn't happen.
"But now that gives us all the extra motivation to go out there and try and make it happen this year.
"So I think that that's a really positive thing that comes out of it. I think you need to try and find what are the learnings and the growths from that match so we can learn from it and make sure that doesn't happen again.
"But at the same time, that's football. You're not going to win every single match.
"We'd love to do that. So I think that, you know, going into this year, it really does just kind of add a little bit of extra fire to everyone that's in this.
"You want to put things right and ideally to have our trophies back is kind of the plan.'
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