THE record books will show that Rangers won the 2008 Scottish Cup, but everyone at Hampden Park yesterday knows that the plaudits will be heading down the M74 to Dumfries.

The men from Govan may have their name written into the annals and engraved on to the trophy, but the names that will be etched into football history will be those of the men from the deep south. Yesterday's folk heroes were all wearing blue – the blue of Queen of the South.

When they speak of club legends, the Doonhamers will no longer automatically mean Billy Houlison, their only international. Now they will refer to the class of 2008, of the stellar side which pushed Rangers to breaking point at Hampden.

They will talk of skipper Jim Thomson and Stevie Tosh, whose goals immediately after the break brought the Doonhamers back on level terms when what had threatened to become an uninspiring cup final looked to be slipping away from the underdogs. But there are others too: young defender Ryan McCann, midfielders Neil MacFarlane and Jamie McQuilken. And then there's targetman Sean O'Connor, whose guile, strength and urgency in the second half sorely stretched a defence that had taken the Ibrox side to a European final just days before.

Yet to single out any one Queens player would be wilfully unfair. This was a team effort, as every round of their extraordinary cup campaign has been. Queens' collective will to win and self-belief have seen them muscle their way past Linlithgow Rose, Peterhead, Morton and Dundee before, in the greatest result of their history, they put Aberdeen to the sword in their gutsy attempt to become the first team from outside the top flight to win the cup since East Fife beat Kilmarnock on a replay in 1938.

If Queens gave their all in getting here, yesterday they left no regrets out on the park. They were beaten by a better side but unheralded youngsters such as Robert Harris, Andy Aitken, Paul Burns and Jamie MacDonald showed that they don't lack for guts and heart. By the time Barry Ferguson went up to collect the trophy, Rangers knew they had been in a colossal contest.

The underdogs needed that determination and willingness to bleed for the cause from the get-go. Within seconds of the whistle Doonhamers defender McCann left the field with an ugly gash under his eye, and two minutes later Harris was left writhing on the turf after Lee McCulloch slid in hard, fast and, according to the referee, late. The Rangers striker got a yellow card for that no-nonsense challenge.

This has been an extraordinary journey for the men from Palmerston Park. But yesterday was undoubtedly their day. The sleepy footballing outpost must have been emptied of townsfolk to judge by the procession of scarf-adorned buses which made their way to Mount Florida yesterday. Once there the Queens supporters wasted no time in making themselves heard.

Their noisy urgings had exactly the desired catalytic effect, and throughout a tousy first half Queens made sure Rangers had no pause for thought. If their frontmen looked hesitant and shot shy, the midfield and defence had no such misgivings. In fact, within the first quarter of the match referee Dougal looked as if he was seriously considering handing out more than a caution to skipper Jim Thomson, former Celtic midfielder Jamie McQuilken and Neil MacFarlane for their conspicuously physical approach to snuffing out Rangers at source.

The hyperactive Jean-Claude Darcheville came in for more than his fair amount of punishment, but then he's a tank of a man and seemed happy to simply shrug off the close attentions of the Queens defence. DaMarcus Beasley and Kris Boyd are made of less stern stuff though and both seemed irked by the application of an agricultural gameplan that was long on perspiration and short on inspiration.

Even after Boyd gained some measure of revenge for the rough treatment by slamming home a free-kick after 33 minutes to make it 1-0 to Rangers (and in the process consolidate his reputation for scoring against the wee teams), the Division One side didn't slow the frenetic pace of the game or stop flying into the tackle.

Even when Rangers seemed home and clear, they kept going. Even when Beasley's goal just before half-time looked as if it might herald an opening of the floodgates, Queens stuck to their task. Queens weren't for giving up. They didn't come this far to lie down and die.

They must have been fortified by some half-time talk from manager Gordon Chisholm because they came out like men possessed after the break, and soon found that fortune really can favour the brave. O'Connor, previously muted and ineffectual, was a changed man and it was he who made the goal, skinning Carlos Cuellar down the right before driving the ball into the danger area for Tosh to chest it in to make it 2-1.

At the heart of everything Queens did was the lanky bald figure of Thomson. The 37-year-old local boy is the original one-man club, a player who has been at Palmerston Park since the days when the Worzels were at No.1 with that seminal piece of agri-pop, I've Got a Brand New Combine Harvester. His defensive efforts were Herculean and just three minutes after Tosh's goal he brought Queens level, showing the same determination to be first when Harris knocked a free-kick on the right into the guts of the Rangers penalty area.

The Queens fans were in raptures, and 10,000 of them rose to give the Girvan and Lockerbie Loyal opposite a couple of rounds of "you're not singing any more". Boyd's late goal may have temporarily silenced them, but it will have done little to remove the satisfaction they could take from rising to the occasion They arrived as sacrificial lambs and left as lions.