JUST over half an hour gone and we’re pinging the ball around like we own the place.
Billy Gilmour’s smashed one off the bar a few moments back, Scott McTominay’s about to have one tipped onto a post.
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Ben Doak’s terrifying them every time we feed him.
John McGinn’s got the chest puffed out, Robbo’s back to his very best, the centre-backs are making magnificent blocks, the oldest keeper in town’s hurling himself around like a teenager.
It’s brilliant to watch. It’s the kind of football that makes you believe anything’s possible.
Yet as we swagger and we strut, as we pass and move and carve the Poles open, there’s a thought nagging at my head. And I’m guessing it’s in yours too.
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Where the hell was THIS Scotland at the Euros?
What happened to us for those ten, terrible days?
Because if we’d played there the way we did in Warsaw…nah, let’s not torment ourselves. Let’s not do all the what if stuff, let’s not exhume the body of our hopes and dreams and carry out a post mortem as pointless as it would be painful.
Bottom line? We blew it in Germany. We never kicked a ball. We lost our bottle, we froze. Put it any way you like, but we stank the place out.
Life’s not about what happened in the past, though, it’s about how we react to it in the present so we create a better future.
And no one can deny that’s what Steve Clarke and his players have done since then.
Game by game, we’ve rid ourselves of those rank-rotten memories and started creating happier ones. Despite defeat after defeat in the first half of this Nations League campaign, we’ve looked closer and closer to our old selves.
Then we got our first point at home to Portugal.
Then we beat Croatia to give ourselves a chance of avoiding relegation.
Then we got worked out that maybe – just maybe – we could do even better than that.
And even though in the end the sums didn’t add up for us, we then went and did what we did here, a terrific night capped with the fairytale of skipper Andy Robertson marking cap No80 with the bullet header that hauled us into a play-off that might keep us among the Nations League elite.
In racking up the seven points that leapfrogged us over the Poles, we produced a trio of performances that change nothing about the weedy way we went out of those Euros, but which sure as hell send us into the World Cup qualifiers feeling a whole lot better about ourselves.
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From the opening 66 seconds, when Robertson sprinted the width of the box to make a terrific sliding block as Seb Szymanski made to pull the trigger, we meant business.
By the third minute, we were ahead when one pocket dynamo in Gilmour fizzed a pass to another in Doak, who rolled one square for a third in McGinn to place his shot as accurately as if he’d carried the ball and dropped it into keeper’s bottom right corner.
Yes, after that there were too many moments when we let the Poles in behind us, but every time it happened we made up for it with some heroic last-ditch defending – and when we got on the front foot again, we finally, properly looked like we belonged at this level.
It all peaked in those four or five minutes as the clock ticked past 30, a spell during which we were both patient in our passing but urgent in our desire to break the home lines.
Gilmour, so far off target with two efforts at Hampden on Friday night, got his sights right this time and left the crossbar shuddering.
Only the outstretched fingers of Lukasz Skorupski diverted McTominay’s crisp drive onto the right-hand upright, Robertson’s netbound rebound sent spinning wide by Kamil Piatowski’s desperate lunge.
Sadly for Clarke, his tiring players and the hoarse-throated Tartan Army, though, Piatowski’s next crucial involvement was anything but desperate – you know, except for our chances of avoiding the drop.
All night, the 41-and-11-months-old Craig Gordon had stopped everything that came his way and on the one time he hadn’t, the immaculate John Souttar had been behind him to clear off the line.
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But just before the hour, we couldn’t properly clear our area under pressure and when right-back Piatowski met it on the run from the corner of the box, five 20-year-old Gordons couldn’t have stopped the shot as it arrowed into his top right postage stamp.
When the same fingertips that had denied McTominay then did the same to Lyndon Dykes six minutes later, it felt like maybe our last chance of avoiding relegation had gone.
Wouldn’t you just know it, though?
Couldn’t just just have seen it written in the stars?
Down the right went Souttar, magnificent first till last, to clip a cross Doak himself would have been proud of – and there was Robbo at the far post, producing a header Joe Jordan would have applauded.
What an end to his special night.
What a climax to a campaign when we regained our pride.
And, yes, what a bummer that we didn’t snatch second place and sneak our way into Pot 1 for that World Cup qualifying draw.
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But boy, what a prospect that draw still is now.
Bring it on…
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