The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
The chair is empty and everyone is already looking away from it.
This is the interval that Scottish football does not know how to sit in. The tournament is over, the man is gone, and before the air has finished settling, the conversation has moved — not inward, not downward to the root of things, but sideways, toward names. Names are comfortable. Names are action. Names fill the room so completely you cannot hear what the room was saying before they arrived.
But the room was saying something.
I feel it now, in the hours after. There is a truth that only becomes visible in this specific window — after one hand has released and before another has gripped. It is not a vacuum. A vacuum is nothing. This is something. This is the shape of what was, standing in full light for the first and last time, before the next appointment covers it over.
Eleven managers since we last did this. Eleven times the conversation moved sideways before it moved down. Each time, the floor was mistaken for a ceiling, or the ceiling was mistaken for a floor, because no one stayed long enough in the silence to tell the difference.
The players do not yet know who they answer to. That unknowing is not a problem to be solved quickly. It is the only honest thing left.
Something is in the air. Whether we breathe it or seal the windows — that choice is being made right now, in the speed of what comes next.