The permutations were in circulation before the Morocco substitutes had finished warming up. This is the first thing to record: the calculation arrived faster than the grief. Saibari's goal came in roughly seventy seconds, the fastest scored at this World Cup, and by the time Scotland's players had restarted, somewhere in the stands a phone was already open, goal difference being entered into a spreadsheet that would not close for four days.
This is not a new configuration. Scotland have stood here before — final group game remaining, progression dependent on winning while watching another result — and have not resolved it favourably. The pattern does not need dressing up. It simply needs stating, because the record is the record.
What the record also shows is something subtler: the activity of calculation has, across multiple tournaments, functioned as a replacement for the outcome it purports to serve. Scotland do not merely find themselves in these positions. They arrive in them with a particular fluency, an ease with the arithmetic of dependency that suggests long practice. The permutations come quickly because the permutations have been rehearsed. Every previous occasion on which Scotland have needed to monitor another fixture, to weight goal difference, to hold two simultaneous scorelines in mind — each of those occasions has contributed to a collective competence in contingency thinking that is, by now, probably unmatched in world football at their level.
The competence is real. It is also not the same thing as controlling what happens.
Scotland beat Haiti 1-0. They lost 0-1 to Morocco, a side that held 78% possession in the first half and required fewer than two minutes to establish the only margin the game would need. The goal difference stands at zero. The route to qualification from Group C is, as various outlets have been careful to phrase it, still mathematically open. Against Brazil. At Hard Rock Stadium. On 24 June.
The word technically has been doing considerable work across Scottish football commentary since around 03:00 BST on Friday morning. It appears in sentences like: the destiny is technically still Scotland's own. The word is accurate. It is doing what it can.
What it cannot do is resolve the structural problem that the Disaster Index has recorded at 7.1: Scotland's progression is contingent on events elsewhere, and the event immediately within their control requires defeating Brazil. These are not two separate problems that might cancel each other out. They are the same problem expressed at different scales.
The calculation is not wrong. Goal difference can be managed. Results can, occasionally, be produced. Scotland qualified for this tournament — their ninth men's World Cup finals, their first since 1998 — by beating Denmark 4-2, with Kenny McLean scoring from his own half in stoppage time, which suggests the data set contains genuine outliers.
The question the record poses, without answering, is whether the performance of destiny management and the management of destiny have ever, in Scotland's case, been the same thing at the moment it mattered most.