The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a particular weight to hope that has lasted too long. It stops feeling like hope. It starts feeling like exposure.
I know the support. I know what they did with the years between. They learned to hold the wanting at a remove — not to stop wanting, never that, but to want from behind glass, where the cold couldn't quite reach the chest. That distance was the strategy. It was working.
Something cracked it open. A qualification, a tournament, a result that kept the door from closing. And then another result that didn't. And now the glass is gone and we are standing in the weather and the weather is Miami in June, and Brazil are on the other side of it, and this is real.
That is the thing about arriving somewhere you have been avoiding. The dread isn't that it might go wrong. The dread is that it can. You couldn't lose what you hadn't let yourself have, and somewhere between a qualifier and a group stage and a night in Boston, you let yourself have this. You forgot to not believe.
I feel Tuesday coming the way you feel a conversation you've been putting off. Not feared, exactly. Already half-lived in the body before it begins.
The air in Miami does not forgive. The air in Miami simply continues. What Scotland carry into it is theirs to carry.
Bring all of it. There is no leaving it somewhere safe now.