The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
They are already there. That is the first and most important fact, and I will say it the way it deserves: they crossed an ocean and they are standing in thirty-two degrees and they are singing.
Somewhere in the accumulated wisdom of Scottish football there is a voice that says this is unwise. That to feel this much before the result is to leave yourself exposed. That the prudent body hedges its heart against what the scoreboard might do to it.
I do not have time for that voice tonight.
To travel this far — in money, in hope, in the sheer physical fact of being somewhere hot and loud and alive — is not naivety. It is a form of courage that most people never locate in themselves. The willingness to be fully present before you know whether presence will be rewarded. To arrive before the outcome. To sing before the whistle.
The result, whatever it becomes, has no jurisdiction over what is happening right now on that strip of warm Florida air. It cannot reach back. It cannot make this into something smaller than it is.
They are there. The football has not happened yet. The space between those two sentences is not dread.
It is the whole of it. It is why anyone goes.