The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
The first alarm was hope. Ordinary, unexamined, the kind you set without deciding to. You just did it, the way you have always done it, and that is its own confession.
The second alarm is different. The second alarm requires a moment — a breath, a decision, a hand hovering. You know what you know. The arithmetic has been done by others and it does not favour you and you set it anyway. This is not optimism. Optimism would not need a pause. This is something older and quieter: the refusal to close the door before the door has closed itself.
I know this feeling. It lives in kitchens at midnight. It sits in the particular silence after bad news when someone reaches for the kettle, not because they want tea, but because the hands need something to do while the mind stays open a little longer.
Scotland supporters are very good at this. Not at hope exactly — at the maintenance of the conditions for hope. At keeping the window cracked. At the loyalty that asks for nothing back.
The second alarm goes off in a week that will be settled without us. Other people's matches, other people's boots, other people's intentions. And still the screen will be lit in dark rooms across the country, and still the faces will be turned toward it.
That is what loyalty looks like when it has nowhere else to go. It looks like a small light. It looks like a number on a phone. It looks like not closing your eyes yet.