The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a particular way Scotland supporters hold their bodies when they are watching someone else's match. Slightly forward. Hands not quite free. The phone on the table, face up, which is different from the phone on the table. You would know it if you saw it. I would know it anywhere.
We have been here before — not in the way you can look up, but in the way the body remembers. The specific quality of caring about something you cannot touch. This is not the same as hope, though it is dressed in hope's clothes. Hope implies a door you can still reach. What Scotland supporters do now is older than hope. It is vigil. It is the candle you keep burning in a room you have left.
The other matches will happen. Other people will run toward goals with no thought of us, and the arithmetic will shift, and somewhere in Scotland a phone will brighten on a table and someone will lean forward a little more, then a little more.
This is what we do. This is, I think, what we have always done — stood at the edge of things we built and then could no longer enter. The grief of it is real. But I want you to notice something: we are still here, still watching, still forward in our chairs.
That is not helplessness. That is the shape devotion takes when it has nowhere left to go but inward.
Keep the phone face up. Something is still moving.