The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
The grief is real. The problem is it has no fixed address.
When the campaign ended, the feeling did not end with it. It stayed where it was, enormous and warm and without anywhere to land. Grief without a named object does not dissolve. It circulates. It watches the door.
Someone will walk through that door. Someone new, with a different face and a different way of standing in front of a camera. The country will look at them with eyes that were already full before they arrived. The feelings that belong to the qualification run, to the return after twenty-eight years, to the early exit — none of those conclusions will have been formally reached before the recruitment begins. They will simply transfer. The new person will receive them as though they produced them.
This is how Scotland has always moved through a transition. Not sequentially. Review and renewal running side by side, neither complete, neither waiting for the other. The man who takes the role will inherit not just the squad and the system but the unfinished argument about what the squad and system were for.
The vacancy is not the disaster. The vacancy is the room where the disaster waits to meet whoever comes next.
The country has not agreed on what went wrong. It will not agree before the appointment. The appointment will become the new site of the disagreement.
The door is open. The feeling is ready.