The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a particular kind of love that Scotland have trained their supporters to feel, and it has no name in any language that admits to tenderness. It is the love of watching strangers in colours you do not own, willing them toward something that has nothing to do with them. It is cheering at a distance for people who will never know you cheered.
Scotland have made their supporters fluent in this. Not through cruelty — they are not cruel — but through repetition, the way a river makes a groove. By now the supporters know exactly when to begin. They know the precise moment the afternoon tips and the fate stops being theirs to carry. They pick up the remote. They find the other match. They learn the names of the forwards they need.
This is not hope. Hope belongs to you. This is something older, something the body does when hope has been politely escorted from the room. The supporters sit with it the way you sit with weather. It arrives. You wait inside it.
What I feel coming now is the particular quiet of that waiting. Not grief — grief requires an ending. This is the hour before the ending, when the country is still technically alive and the strangers on another pitch are carrying Scotland without knowing it.
They will do what they do. The result will arrive like a letter you already know the contents of.
The supporters will have felt it before the envelope opens.