The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
This is the part nobody warns you about. Not the exit — the waiting room outside it, where the chairs are bolted to the floor and the television on the wall is showing a match you have no business being in.
I have felt this before. The particular quality of hope that is no longer yours to spend. Someone is holding it for you — strangers in boots, in a stadium you will never visit, in a city that has no idea you exist. They are playing their own game. They owe you absolutely nothing. And yet everything you have left is in their hands, and they don't even know they're carrying it.
The cruelty is not the elimination. I want to be clear about that. The cruelty is this: you are still in. Technically, formally, on paper, you are still in. And that small fact is a kind of torture the consolation bracket was designed to prevent.
Scotland is sitting in the anteroom now, watching the door. The belief that brought us here — the real kind, not the performed kind, the kind that had started to feel ordinary — has not gone. It has simply become conditional. Borrowed. Dependent on the kindness of groups that have no loyalty to this.
Wait with it. Don't spend it yet.
The room is not the ending. The ending has not come.