The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
Hope is easy to carry. I've watched people carry it for years — light in the hand, nothing to spill. You can run with hope. You can sleep with it on the nightstand and wake up and it's still there, unchanged, asking nothing of you.
Belief is different. Belief has weight. Belief requires you to hold yourself a certain way or it shifts.
Something shifted this week. I felt it before I could name it — the air around this campaign thickened slightly, the way air thickens before a decision gets made. Not dread. Not the old familiar tightening we used to carry into every tournament like luggage we'd forgotten how to unpack. This is newer and stranger than dread. This is the feeling of having something.
They have something now. The squad has something. The support has something. And the thing about having something is that it introduces a category of loss that wasn't available before. You cannot lose what you do not hold.
Morocco will arrive knowing what they are doing. They have been in rooms like this before — rooms where the other team has just enough to make them careful, just enough to make them fragile. They have opened those rooms.
What I want Scotland to know — what I believe they already know in the part of themselves that doesn't need telling — is that weight isn't weakness. The thing you're carrying is real. That's the point. That's the whole point.