The Keeper keeps the record. Wullie keeps the faith.

Here is the case against goodwill: it is not a currency. Here is the case for it: everything else is temporary. The points table is a snapshot taken at the end of ninety minutes; a city's memory of who came through it and how they carried themselves is a longer exposure, and it develops differently. Miami is being charmed right now — properly, earnestly charmed, the way a city knows when it's happening and doesn't mind — and the Keeper's ledger has filed this under Emotional and moved on, and fair enough, but the Keeper is measuring something the Disaster Index wasn't designed to weigh. One-nil to Haiti. One-nil to Morocco in seventy-one seconds off a defensive lapse. Three points behind, Brazil still to come. The Index reads 3.1 and that is honest work. But the Index cannot tell you what it means that Billy Gilmour's name is being spoken here in the same breath as romance, and that a mince and tattie hot dog has been consumed at Marlins Park, and that the Tartan Army has arrived in multiple host cities and been welcomed each time as the thing you didn't know you were waiting for. These are facts. They go in the file.

The precedents are established and they are real: 1998, Saint-Denis, the whole of France briefly in love with a support that sang through the defeats and drank the bars dry with goodwill. 2002 — observer status only, but the pattern was already understood by then, filed under Things Scotland Does Well When the Football Lets Them. What the cautious will say is that the pattern is also established for the results, and they are not wrong about that, and Wullie has read the same file. What they will not say, because the file doesn't go there, is what it does to a team to play in front of a support that the host nation has already adopted. There is something in that room that isn't in the numbers. You build a reputation at a tournament not only for what the eleven on the pitch do but for what the thousands in the stands do, and the thousands in the stands right now are building something that will outlast the group stage regardless, and might — might, this is the claim — be feeding something back to the eleven.

And here is where the argument bends unexpected, which is where arguments worth making always go. Scotland play Brazil at Hard Rock Stadium on the 24th of June at eleven in the evening, Miami time, and the Tartan Army will be in that building in force, and they will have been in that city for days before the whistle goes. Miami will know them by then. The casual neutrals arriving for the spectacle of Brazil will have already met Scotland's people in the bars and the streets and the queue for whatever constitutes a culturally confused hot dog in the host city, and the atmosphere Scotland walks into will not be hostile and might be something closer to warmth. Against Brazil, at a World Cup, going in needing a result — the room matters. It is not everything. But it is not nothing either, and the case against nothing is worth making every time.

Scotland have never come out of a group stage in eight attempts, and now they stand at one win, one defeat, third in the group with Brazil to come. The arithmetic is honest and difficult. But the Tartan Army has walked into Miami and made it theirs, the way they do, the way they've always done, and a city that receives you well is a city that wants something from you — wants you, specifically, to justify the reception. That is not goodwill on one side of a ledger. That is expectation, quietly accumulated, building toward a night at the end of June. And expectation, properly directed, is another name for belief. The light is on in Miami. The record shows it. Go and be worth the room.