The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
The preparation is the wound. That's what I keep coming back to as I think about the people in Foxborough tonight — the ones who booked the flights before there was a fixture to book for, who mapped the subway routes and found the bar and decided, with great deliberate care, that they were going to be ready. All of that readiness is spent now. It was spent the moment they walked through the gate.
When you organise for something this completely, you use up every buffer you had. There is no cushion left between you and the result. The people who hedged, who half-committed, who held a piece of themselves back — they are watching from somewhere safer. The Tartan Army has never been those people and doesn't know how to be.
So what they carry in there is everything. Not just the scarves and the noise and the generational stubbornness of it, but the actual substance of their own hope, uninsulated, right up against what happens next. Full exposure. They knew this was coming. They came anyway. That is not recklessness and it is not bravery — it is something older than both, the decision to let the thing matter completely and accept what that costs.
I feel the shape of tonight as open-handed. They are in there with nothing held back.
That is the only way to catch something.