The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
It is not the losing that has people quiet.
I know what losing-dread feels like in this country — it is an old coat, worn soft, worn familiar. Scotland knows how to carry that. We have fitted ourselves to its weight over decades until the weight stopped feeling like weight and started feeling like posture.
This is something else.
What is moving through the air right now is the dread of having to want it. Really want it. The match that has lived in argument and imagination and the comfortable untestable — that match is beginning to take on edges. Become a thing that could actually happen. And the moment it becomes real, the myth has to become desire, and desire is where the exposure is.
Because if you want it — if you let yourself want it — then you are someone who could be disappointed in a way that has no floor.
Defeat against England you have rehearsed. You have speeches ready. You know which face you will make.
But winning. Nobody has unpacked that room. Nobody knows what they would do inside it, what it would ask of them, what it would mean about all the years it wasn't happening.
That is what's gathering now. Not fear of the result. Fear of finally having to find out what you actually feel.