IN looking for someone to help promote their Persevered tour, Hibernian could not have alighted on a more suitable candidate than Darren McGregor. The Easter Road club elected to mark last year’s historic Scottish Cup success by taking the trophy around 114 venues in Edinburgh and the surrounding areas, one stop for every year they had waited to get their hands on the trophy once more.

McGregor, a lifelong Hibs fan, happily tagged along on several of those dates, even if a proposed visit to his old primary school in Leith had to be shelved on the grounds that it had been long since bulldozed to the ground.

McGregor’s career trajectory also tied in nicely with the message Hibs were wanting to portray of never giving up. The defender was relatively late arriving into the professional game, did not turn full-time until he was nearly 25, and then missed two years of football due to injury. And yet at no point did he abandon his dream. Now he can approach a second successive William Hill Scottish Cup semi-final this afternoon having won both the cup and the Championship over the past 12 months.

“The tour has been unbelievable,” he said. “The club asked me what primary school I went to so we could take it there, but it’s been closed down. Which probably tells you something about what kind of primary I went to.

“The highlight for me was taking it back to Leith Athletic, the team I started with as an under-11. I was quite a late starter [as a player] and stayed there to under-19s. So that was special, taking the trophy down there, showing the kids and saying: “Listen, you can make it, even if you’re here at 13, 14, 15…”

“There’s this big assumption that, if you’re not playing with Hibs and Hearts at the age of 13, you’re done. Young players can use me as an inspiration, someone who made it as a full-time professional at 24, going on 25. I took until 19 to get to Cowdenbeath. So, if you can take a bit of motivation from that, do it. You can do it.

“Even a couple of years before that, I was in a clothes shop folding jeans so it really is a dream come true and, as I keep telling people, the dream just gets better and better. Going to Rangers from St Mirren that was unbelievable.

“Then for Mark Warburton to turn up and effectively release me, if there was one other club in Britain I wanted to join, it was Hibs. So to then get this chance, come to Hibs and win the Scottish Cup, then win the Championship - it’s all a win-win for me.”

Aberdeen will start the tie as favourites but McGregor felt it would be unwise to write Hibs off. “We know that Aberdeen are strong all over the park. They’ve got some really good players – in fact, I don’t think they’ve got any weaknesses, to be honest. But I believe that we’re a big-game team. We’ve proven that in past years.”

Today’s occasion also marks a first return to Hampden in four years for Neil Lennon whose last appearance there was overseeing a Celtic Scottish Cup final win over Hibs in 2013. The national stadium has been a scene of mixed results for the Northern Irishman but he is glad to be heading back.

“After the Ayr game in the quarter-final I knew we were going back and it was a good feeling,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it and I know the stadium pretty well. It’s different, the logistics are different, but the good thing is that it’ll still be fresh in the players’ minds because they played there three or four times last year.

“I’ve got some great Hampden memories although I’ve also had some disappointing ones as well. I suppose I’m in the in-between bracket. I think we normally take the east side at Hampden. That’ll be home from home because we were always there with Celtic.”