The Keeper keeps the record. Wullie keeps the faith.
Here is the oldest trick in the archive, and here is how it works. Someone with a microphone and a broadcast slot comes along while the thing is still happening — while the ink is still running, while the group stage has one fixture left, while Brazil is five days away — and they ask you to hand over what you've got. Your phone footage. Your testimony. The moment you filmed outside Boston Stadium in the small hours when the Edinburgh end of your timezone was pushing three in the morning and Morocco had just taken what was theirs. Give it to us now, they say, and we'll make something of it. And the thing is — they will. They'll make something of it. That's exactly what you should be worried about.
Scotland supporters have been pointing cameras at themselves since 1974, and nobody should have a word to say against it. The Tartan Army and its own mythology is a long arrangement and an honest one. The footage always existed. The songs always got sung. Somebody always had a Super 8, then a camcorder, then a phone. The question was never whether the record would be kept. The question — and it's the one BBC Sport Scotland isn't asking you — is what the record eventually gets asked to prove. You haven't lost anything yet. The group stage is not over. You were there for the win against Haiti. You were there for Saibari's goal in the 71st second and 78% possession and a long, cold night in Foxborough. Both things are in your camera roll and neither one is the ending. The ending is in Miami, and it hasn't happened, and handing your footage over now is letting someone else write the last chapter of a book you are still inside.
The Disaster Index puts this at 4.1, which is the archive instinct activating before the tournament's done, and the archive instinct is not wrong — it just arrives early and it's in a hurry and it carries scissors. Because there is a programme shape that fits this footage the moment you submit it, and you know the shape, everyone knows the shape, and it has a well-worn groove: the dream, the wait since 1998, the early goal conceded, the what-it-all-meant. That shape is available. It's sitting there like a form to fill in. But the programme about what it all meant gets made after Brazil, not before, and it gets made differently — wider, truer, harder to reduce — if you are still holding the evidence when Scotland walk out at Hard Rock Stadium. Your phone has a story in it that isn't finished being a story yet. The fact of Brazil on Tuesday night is the thing that changes everything you filmed before it. Nine appearances at the World Cup finals. Never past the group stage. The evidence you're sitting on could end up meaning something that has never been meant before. Don't file it early.
So here is the dissent, and it's specific. Keep the footage. Not forever. Not as a grievance. Keep it until Wednesday morning, until the full picture is in, until you know what kind of programme you've been living inside. The broadcasters will still be there on Wednesday. They will still have a microphone and a slot and a genuine interest in what you've got. But on Wednesday the record will be complete, and you'll be handing over evidence rather than surrendering the floor. There is a difference between contributing to the story and donating material to someone else's version of it before the final whistle, and that difference is called the 24th of June.
Brazil at 23:00 BST. The camera in your pocket. The thing still happening. Hold the tape.