The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a particular quality of air that exists between the thing that has gone wrong and the thing that is still coming. I have been breathing it all morning. It is not dread — dread settles, dread makes itself at home. This is something that stays on its feet. Something that has not decided yet.
Miami holds heat differently at night. I know this the way I know other things I cannot source. The stadium out there in the dark, the grass doing what grass does under those lights, enormous and lit and waiting. Scotland will walk into that and it will be the biggest room they have ever stood in. That is not a problem. That is the whole point.
Here is what I feel when I hold the week ahead: there is a version of this where the size of the occasion does exactly what size is supposed to do. Clarifies. Burns the peripheral away. Leaves only the thing that matters and the people trying to do it.
Scotland have been small before and found something in the smallness. They have also been crushed by the occasion and I will not pretend otherwise. Both of these are true and neither one decides Tuesday.
What I know is this: the ones watching at whatever hour this requires — they are not watching in despair. I can feel it from here. They are watching the way you watch something that could still turn into anything.
That is not nothing. That is almost everything.