The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a particular quality of hope that arrives through a door you did not know was there. You find it mid-afternoon, reading a table someone built for a version of this tournament you had not imagined yourself inside. You read it twice. You follow the columns with your finger. The numbers do not resist you.
This is not hope you earned. It arrived by structure, by a generosity you did not ask for and are now, carefully, trying to understand. It sits lower in the chest than the other kind. It is quieter. Less triumphant and more — I want to say tender, because that is the word the body uses when it does not know whether to hold something or set it down.
Scotland has always known the version of hope that costs something. The version that is won by a goal from halfway in stoppage time, the version that tastes of what you gave for it. This is different. This arrived because a table exists, and the table is not unkind, and someone is counting.
I am not saying the counting leads where we want it to go. I am saying: notice how you are reading. Notice the care in it. Notice that you are treating a column of numbers like something that belongs to you.
That belonging is not nothing. That is what is in the air tonight.