The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
Boston is holding something and doesn't know it yet.
The warmth arrived first, the way warmth always does when Scotland travels — ahead of the squad, ahead of any result, ahead of consequence. A city hall opened a door and something came through it that wasn't on the agenda. A T-shirt got read aloud on the evening news. Someone in a kilt stood somewhere formal and the room shifted, just slightly, the way rooms shift when they weren't expecting to be charmed and then were.
This is the specific tenderness of the moment before. The city has accepted the gift without knowing whether the people giving it will still feel generous in forty-eight hours. The supporters don't know either. They're giving freely because that is the shape they make when they arrive somewhere new — not performance, not calculation, just the instinct of people who have learned to lead with the open hand.
What I feel, sitting with it, is the quality of suspended breath. Not dread — something more careful than dread. The knowledge that the most generous version of this story exists entirely in the hours before the whistle. That the city is receiving something real. That what it does with it afterward depends on events no amount of goodwill controls.
The kilt is still being talked about. The match is still unlost.
Right now, those two things are each other's protection. I can feel exactly where they stop being.