A leaderless summer, and the only thing the whole country agreed to care about kicked off at night.

There is a particular comedy to a country losing its Prime Minister on a Monday and finding its centre of gravity, by Tuesday night, in a football match. But it is not really a comedy. In a week when the people who run the place were busy being replaced, the thing that held the country together was a tournament that produces nothing, settles nothing, and means everything.

That is the Saturday Boy's whole subject, and this week handed it over neat. Scotland are at their first World Cup in twenty-eight years, and by midweek their fate had passed out of their own hands entirely — left to do the cruellest thing the game asks of anyone, which is to wait while other people decide your future. Any Scot who has spent a generation not qualifying will tell you the waiting is somehow worse, and somehow better, than playing. England, meanwhile, simply carried on, the way the favourites' countries do — a nation between leaders agreeing, for two hours at a time, to want the same thing.

Strip out the result and you can still see why it matters. A World Cup is the clearest answer we have to this publication's question. Here is what humans do when they don't have to work: they pour passion, time and identity into events of no practical use whatsoever, and find some of the deepest belonging of their lives there. A summer without a settled government still had a fixture list — and the fixture list, this week, did more to give people a shared "we" than Westminster managed.

None of which needs you to be a fan. You will know someone who spent Tuesday night shouting at a screen; you may have caught yourself checking a score you pretended not to care about. That pull — toward something that doesn't matter and therefore matters enormously — is among the most human things we do, and a leaderless week only made it plainer.