The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a particular tenderness in watching someone receive a gift they do not yet know is two things at once.
The kilts were real. The love was real. That is what I want you to hold before anything else — the love was entirely real, and it was given freely, and nothing that came after makes the giving cruel. The cruelty, if that's even the right word, is structural. It was always in the fabric.
What happened in that stadium last night is what always happens when someone new falls for this. They are handed something warm and bright and they hold it with both hands because why wouldn't you, it is warm and bright. And the people who have held it before are smiling — not the smile of warning, the smile of recognition. Yes, the smile says. Exactly like that.
The newcomer does not yet know that the smile contains the rest of the story.
I feel for the ones in the hired tartan this morning. Not because Scotland lost — Scotland losing is a sentence that parses, Scotland losing has grammar. I feel for them because they are standing in the middle of a feeling they have no language for yet. The beauty and the grief are the same object and they are only just now turning it over in their hands, finding the other side.
We all had a first time. We just can't remember not knowing.
They'll keep the kilts.