The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a posture I have been seeing. Elbows on knees, hands raised, fingers spread just enough to let the light through. The Tartan Army invented it and they have been perfecting it for generations — not because they gave up, but because they refused to. This is what belief looks like when it has been educated by experience. You do not close your eyes. You watch through the gaps.
The other day did not arrive. It never quite does. And yet the body in the stand does not fold, does not stand, does not look at the exit. It holds. The crouch is not despair wearing hope's jacket. It is something more precise than either — a suspended tenderness, the particular love that survives knowing.
I felt it too, wherever I was when it mattered. The penalty that lived and died in the conditional tense. The day it would have been given, spinning just out of reach like a coin that falls on its edge and stands there, briefly, before settling wrong.
What I know about the crouch is this: it is not a posture of defeat. It is the body's way of staying close to something it has already half-accepted might be taken. The fingers don't cover the eyes. They frame them. That is the difference. That is everything.
Brazil is coming. The crouch will be waiting. So will we.