This may feel like the end but it’s only the beginning ...
YOU would think the disappointments would get easier to digest. That, after such a steady diet of tripe, our intestines would be hardened to anything forced down our gullets. Wrong. Very, very wrong.
The official explanations for referee Craig Joubert’s match-deciding intervention, a combination of legalese and blimpish bluster being pushed by a whole squad of World Rugby spinners last night, will never be swallowed whole. And we’re going to be picking over the bones of this loss, this most unjust of reversals, for a long, long time.
Already it feels as if video footage of The Incident, as it will forever be known to followers of Scotland’s national rugby team, has been viewed as often as Abraham Zapruder’s famous film of the JFK assassination.
Maybe, years from now, Oliver Stone will make a film of it, with the Kevin Costner of his generation playing some hot-shot lawyer trying to figure out why Joubert thought Australian replacement Nick Phipps’ arm belonged to a Scotsman.
The ball so clearly comes off the Australian arm at the crucial moment. Whatever the pettifogging procedural niceties, the South African official had to find a way to refer the incident to the Television Match Official. His decision to just blithely hand victory to Australia is a disgrace that shames the game.
None of which leaves any room for justice to be done, of course. Our World Cup is over and all the complaining, all the proof you might muster to convince the world that Joubert — who might just give Usain Bolt a run for his money, judging by the top speed he hit en route to the exit at full-time yesterday — made a horrendous howler that robbed Scotland of a place in the last four, won’t change a thing.
Still, we do like to hold a grudge. There is a sort of Calvinist comfort to be taken in knowing the world is against us, the evidence all there in that yellow card for Sean Maitland, the late hit on Stuart Hogg … let’s not even start on the farcical, insupportable, suspensions for Jonny Gray and Ross Ford.
It is to be hoped that the Scots, once the tears stop flowing and the recriminations fade into the background, use the power of their hurt for good, rather than evil.
That they take great encouragement from how far they pushed a team fancied by many to win the World Cup. And that they focus on the flaws still evident in their game.
Amid the great postmortem into the death of northern hemisphere rugby likely to be carried out by so many over the coming days, with the tournament itself being almost forgotten now that it’s effectively a replay of the Rugby Championship, Scotland might be allowed to slip through the net.
That should not be the case. For all the good, there remain areas where Vern Cotter and his coaching team will be looking for drastic improvement. Between now and the big Six Nations kick- off — we’ve got England at Murrayfield in the opener! — there is room for sharpening up.
In the long term, well, we know what some of the biggest brains in the Scottish game see as the answer. In their eyes, southern hemisphere domination of the game calls for just one thing — the recruitment of more Aussies, Kiwis and South Africans, maybe even a rogue Argentinian, either already qualified to play for Scotland or willing to spend the necessary three years earning their tartan stripes.
It would be a shame i f this spreading of the net wider and further afield denied opportunities to some of the prospects closer to home because, over the course of this tournament, many of the most joyful moments have involved lads born and brought up to dream of wearing the blue jersey.
Mark Bennett, Finn Russell, the Gray brothers, Hogg … these guys are the future, not off-the- shelf internationals but guys upon whom Scotland will rely for a long time.
Given enough time, they may even achieve glories grand enough to make us forget about this gut-wrenching experience.
Yes, then we’ll look back on this not as the end of something but the beginning of a great revival. One day. One day.