The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There was a private arrangement. You know the one. You were holding it carefully, the way you carry something full to the brim, telling yourself not to look down. The arrangement was simple: it doesn't have to be him. He might not play. He has been resting this whole time and maybe they decide the group is already settled and they leave him resting.
Then the word came through and the arrangement — which was never a plan, never a belief, just a small warm shelter you had been standing in — dissolved. Not with a crash. With the quiet of a door swinging open into cold air.
What replaced it was not fear. Fear would have been cleaner. What replaced it was a particular tiredness, the tiredness of someone who has just understood that they were hoping rather than knowing, and that hoping is its own exhausting labour, and now the labour is over, and what remains is just the match, just the facts of it, bright and unadorned.
This is the worst moment. Not the night in Miami. This.
Because what comes after the bargain dissolves is not despair — it is clarity. And clarity is where Scotland has always lived. It is cold and it is ours and I have seen stranger things gather in worse conditions.
The shelter is gone. The ground under it is solid.