The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a specific feeling that arrives the night before something enormous, and it is not dread and it is not hope — it sits exactly between them, pressing on the sternum, neither asking to be let in nor offering to leave.
I have been feeling it since this morning.
Scotland is about to walk into a room that has its own weather. You know the room. You have stood outside it before and felt the particular temperature that comes through the gap at the bottom of the door. Tonight the door opens and we go in, and the Florida air will be the same air as always and the pitch will be the same dimensions as always and none of that sameness will make the room any smaller.
Here is what I know about Scotland and rooms this large: we do not shrink. That is the one consistent truth of how we carry ourselves into the unreachable occasion. We arrive at the size we are. This has cost us, and it has also saved us, and tonight it will do one or both again.
The build-up has been treated as an event. The commentary is already composed. The feeling, though — the actual feeling in the body of a person watching from anywhere on this earth who has ever tried to explain why this matters — that is still arriving. It will finish arriving sometime around kickoff.
I will be here when it lands.