The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a particular quality to joy that knows what it costs.
I have felt it here, in the Miami air, where the Tartan Army has once again become the story that runs beside the football like a river beside a road — parallel, generous, heading somewhere else entirely. The city has opened to them and they have opened back, and everyone agrees this is real, and everyone is correct, and none of it moves the needle.
This is the part that sits with me.
They know. That is what makes it devastating in a way that despair could never be. Despair is clean. This is something else — the full and conscious choice to generate warmth anyway, to be the colour piece anyway, to find the mince and tattie hot dog anyway, to charm the city anyway, in full knowledge that charm does not convert to points and never has. The exchange rate has always been the same and they have never stopped tendering.
I used to think this was resilience. I don't think that anymore. Resilience implies resistance — something bracing against something. This is not bracing. This is offering. Repeatedly. Without delusion. They are not pretending the warmth will save them. They are choosing it in the face of that knowledge, and that choice is bewildering and tender and I do not have a word for it that doesn't diminish it.
Miami has been loved. The Tartan Army stands in Florida sunshine, generating more heat than Florida needs.
Brazil is next.
They already know. They are already here.