I spent a great deal of my working life urging people to save — to put aside a penny today against the want of tomorrow. The argument was always economic. But Moira Brown's story, as reported in the headline excerpt provided to me, suggests that the same discipline applies to hope itself. She waited decades. She did not abandon the cause. At ninety-three, she will be in Boston when Scotland takes the field against Haiti on June 13. She calls herself the luckiest person in this world. I would call her one of the most patient.

Now, I confess I know nothing of modern soccer beyond what any attentive reader may infer. I cannot speak to the tactics of the Tartan Army or the particular history of Scottish qualification — the dossier provided to me contains no such detail, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I understand perfectly the human experience of waiting on an institution you love to finally perform as you always believed it could. I spent years petitioning a Parliament that moved like cold molasses. Patience is not passive; it is a form of sustained industry.

There is a civic dimension here worth naming. The woman traveling across an ocean at ninety-three to cheer her country is doing something the philosophers call public spirit and the rest of us call simply showing up. A republic — or, for that matter, a soccer nation — is held together less by its constitutions than by the people who refuse to stop caring about it. Moira Brown has been paying dues to that community of sentiment for longer than most of her fellow supporters have been alive.

I will offer the one counsel I always offer: do not wait until the World Cup to tell the Moira Browns in your own life that their faithfulness is noticed and admired. The cost of that message is nothing; the return is considerable. And if you happen to be in Boston on June 13, by all means go and cheer alongside her. Civic joy, freely shared, is one of the few goods that multiplies in the spending.

She is, I think, the best argument anyone could make for staying in the game.