It was the first day of the season, an hour until kick-off. The curtain had not risen; those heroes and villains, strolling players and strutting fools who make up Scottish football’s dramatis personae were yet to make their entrance, and so this moment of expectation belonged, as always, to the fans.

One of these fans, perhaps the most dedicated of all, sat in the supporters’ bar at Firhill, the stadium in the west end of Glasgow, sipping a bottle of lager, one of two he allows himself before each game. A ritual within a ritual. Henry Calderhead, better known as Auld Harry, better still as Harry Bingo, is 97 and has been going to see Partick Thistle, known as the Jags, since the end of the second world war. How extraordinary to think that Harry’s brown eyes – not as sharp these days – had watched Thistle play for more than 70 years, and his voice – not so loud these days – had urged on players who were now old men themselves. To be a supporter for so long requires us to accord that word “passion” its older, deeper meaning: that of endurance, even suffering. The Passion of Harry Bingo was what I had come along to witness, in the hope that this old, rather frail man, swathed in a scarf of gold and red, could teach me to care like he cares. I wanted, in short, to learn to love football.

Don’t get me wrong: I like the game. But I don’t feel it in my guts. This, I say without resentment, is down to my father. He was, in theory, a Stirling Albion fan, but I never knew him to go. He’d had a bad experience at Ibrox or Parkhead, something to do with urine streaming down the steps, and had vowed never to return. The idea that I might be exposed to those animals was out of the question. So, although we lived in Glasgow in the era of Kenny Dalglish and John Greig, although we lived near Aberdeen at the time of Alex Ferguson’s Gothenburg miracle, none of it registered.

This has turned out to be a problem. A passion and knowledge of the game seems to be a basic entry qualification for Scottish manhood. I can fake it for a few minutes with a taxi driver, a barber or a stranger at the bar. I can talk pidgin football, but I’m not a native speaker, and I’ve long felt this as both a lack in myself and something that excludes me from the easy society of other men. I don’t have a team and I don’t have a clue.

At the age of 43, have I left it too late? Perhaps not. On 28 September 1931, the author CS Lewis was travelling to Whipsnade Zoo in the sidecar of a motorcycle when he found that, all of a sudden, he was a Christian. “When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus is the Son of God and when we reached the zoo I did,” he recalled in his memoir, Surprised By Joy. I would dearly love to go through something of the same. I want to be surprised by Moyes. Or Mourinho, or McInnes. The manager doesn’t matter, nor the team. What I want is a conversion experience.

“Naw, naw,” Harry Bingo said. “You’re never too auld.” If I was to start going to Firhill now, he winked, I could fit in another 50-odd years. “One thing about Thistle, you’ll always get a good day out. Once you start following them, there’s no other team. There’s no going back.”

Harry Bingo, 97, has been a Partick fan for 70 years. Photograph: Robert Ormerod/The Guardian

This was a particularly good day for Harry. He was the recipient of a golden ticket, which gets him into games for free for the rest of his life – a reward for his loyalty. “Just think of all the pain he had to go through to get that,” some wag at the next table said. Harry ignored him, or perhaps didn’t hear, his hearing aids being a great filter of cheek. The Jags, better known these days for their joyously unsettling mascot Kingsley, designed by the artist David Shrigley, are often the butt of jokes; even their own supporters are quick to remind you that their full name is “Partick Thistle nil”.

Harry was here with his family: granddaughters Mary and Heather, and Heather’s girl, Cara, who is seven. What, I asked, does this club mean to him? “Everything. My life goes around Partick Thistle. And the bingo. See, when Thistle get beat, I go home and I lie in bed and I can’t sleep.” And when they win? He stuck up his thumbs. Those thumbs contain multitudes.

It was at the bingo that I first met Harry, a few years ago at the Carlton hall on Dumbarton Road. He was already a nonagenarian, and had thus gone beyond the scope of the bingo books, which go up only to 90. He was there every day, he explained, except when the Jags were playing.

“If we were going to an away game in maybe Perth or Dundee, we could get back in time for the bingo,” Heather had told me. “He’d be sitting on the edge of his seat making sure the driver was going as fast as he possibly could. He wouldn’t miss the football to get to the bingo, but if he could do both in the same day, then that was the best day ever.”

Heather is 36, Mary 50. They are both committed Partick fans, having been introduced into the true faith by their grandfather. They had the experience I lacked: a love of a club handed down the family like an heirloom or, depending on how you look at it, a hereditary disease. As wee girls, they’d sell programmes, making pocket money from tips. “I used to rope in some of my friends from school,” Heather said. “I’d say, ‘If you sell programmes with me, you’ll get in for nothing and you’ll get a free pie.’ But most of them fell away eventually.”

Why does football mean so much to so many people? “That’s a very simple question which has many answers,” says John Williams, a senior sociology lecturer at Leicester University. He is a Liverpool supporter and a specialist in fan behaviour. “It is still substantially, for many people, about family and place. The world changes very quickly these days. Lots of people feel quite alienated about their relationships and connections with place, and football is a kind of anchor.” Williams believes that football as a provider of identity has strengthened as other traditional sources – work, religion, the stable family unit – have declined in influence. “For a lot of post-industrial towns in England and Scotland, that is precisely what is going on.”

Supporters watch Partick play St Johnstone. Photograph: Robert Ormerod/The Guardian

Harry Bingo was born in 1919. His first job was as a “trace boy”, leading the heavy horses that helped pull carts loaded with beer barrels from Speirs Wharf to town. He’s had lung cancer and skin cancer. A cold in the winter can go into his chest. The week before this season opener against Inverness Caledonian Thistle, he had keeled over while watching his team take on Queen’s Park in the league cup. “Low blood pressure,” he said. “Conked me oot.” Yet here he was back.

“Right, come on, boys,” Mary said, taking her grandfather by the arm, and the supporters seated by the stairs in the Jackie Husband stand leaned out their left shoulders so Harry could rest on each as he made his way to his seat. There was no sense that they pitied him. This was a guard of honour.

Three o’clock approached. Constant drizzle. Floodlights in early August. Just shy of 3,000 people here. There was a minute’s applause for a 16-year-old fan who had been stabbed to death not quite two months before. “Once a Jag,” said the voice on the tannoy, “always a Jag.”

It wasn’t much of a first half, but a Thistle goal in the 36th minute brought things to life. I’ve rarely seen anyone look happier than Harry Bingo. It was a look of pure, transcendent joy, the sort of expression you might find on a stained-glass window to illustrate the adoration of the Magi. “He cannae shout,” Mary explained. “He husnae got the voice any more.” But Harry didn’t need to. His feelings were clear. “I’m happy,” he said.

Last season, Mary explained, her grandfather had informed her he wasn’t going to the football any more. “I’m a burden,” he’d said. She wasn’t having that: “No, you’re no.’” She would get no pleasure from going, she told me, knowing that he was at home. His commitment to the club, after all, is greater than that shown by any player or manager. Harry Bingo is Partick Thistle in a sense. He had celebrated his 70th, 80th and 90th birthdays there, and the director Jacqui Low hoped to host his centenary. That day will come, God willing, but for now he’ll settle for a decent season.

“We’re looking for a win the day,” he had told Alan Archibald sternly as the manager presented him with the golden ticket, and a win is what he got. The lanyard around Harry’s neck, I noticed, said Thistle Forever And Ever.

***

We were somewhere along the A9 when an idea took hold. “Here,” Shep said, “that’s us going past Stirling Castle. Is the bar no’ gettin’ opened?” And suddenly the air was full of rustling as poly bags were produced and their contents offered round: pre-mixed vodka in two-litre bottles of own-brand fizzy orange, lemonade and diet cola. “Pretty classy,” Keith said. “Nae Buckfast on this bus. This is Queen’s Park.”

Stirling Castle, high on its rock, has had many noble functions over the years – royal palace, besieged fortress, army barracks – but today it served as a beacon for a coachload of football fans heading north from Glasgow, a sign that it was a decent moment to get the drink out.

It was nine in the morning on Saturday 10 September 2016, a massive day in British football. A day of derbies, grudges. Manchester United versus Manchester City was being talked up as a personal battle between Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho. In Scotland, all the focus was on Rangers and Celtic. The action, clearly, was elsewhere. Yet it felt good to be driving almost 200 miles with around 20 Queen’s Park fans, the entire travelling support, to an away game in Peterhead. There was an air of “we few, we happy few” about the occasion, if Agincourt had been fuelled by Greggs sausage rolls and ersatz Fanta. No one seemed to mind that there was something tragicomic about it. “Epic scenes,” Martin had observed when we stopped for passengers on the High Street, “as five folk get on in the toon.”

Martin, Keith, Shep, Higgy, Ian, the Vicar: I was getting to know these fans. I’d been to a home game the weekend before, and been introduced to a few. Higgy is Michael Higgins, a 53-year-old railway worker who has been going to see this team since he was a boy. In the social club before the match, I had explained my quest to learn to love football. “I’ll give you a challenge,” he had said. “Go and watch Queen’s for five games on the trot and that’ll be you. Folk talk about Barcelona and Real Madrid and all that, but if we bludgeon out a 1-0 win the day, that, for me, is better.”

Queen’s Park, known as the Spiders, is my local team. I can walk to Hampden from my house in 20 minutes, so it makes both practical and a kind of moral sense for me to support them. I also enjoy the oddness of their history: that they are the oldest club in Scotland; that they invented the passing game; that they have chosen to remain amateur, their players unpaid. This keeps them true to the purity of the sport’s roots, but is also a form of masochism: it means they will never again compete at the highest level. Those black-and-white jerseys, which the players wear untucked to signify their amateur status, are hair shirts of sorts, and all of that raises the question: who supports a team like this? “Freaks and weirdos,” said Gordon McCallum, a middle-aged fan in a black Harrington jacket and oxblood Doc Martens, who lives in a flat in Govan with six parrots. “I fit in perfectly.”

Home is where the heart is: Partick’s Firhill stadium. Photograph: Robert Ormerod/The Guardian

It is one of Queen’s Park’s pleasant absurdities that home games are played at Hampden, Scotland’s national stadium, which seats 52,000, in front of crowds of 500. There is no atmosphere, except when a burst of Enjoy Yourself by the Specials blares over the tannoy to mark a Queen’s goal. This tradition is a nod to the Two Tone movement with which Queen’s, in their monochrome hoops and with their cohort of ska-loving fans, are associated. Home game aficionados might also find themselves playing “Vicar bingo”: mentally ticking off the repertoire of shouted insults from Stewart Hendry, known as the Vicar, a 76-year-old supporter who witnessed the debut of a 16-year-old Alex Ferguson in November 1958. Each outburst from the Vicar comes wafting across the crowd, fragranced by the Clan tobacco that he favours in his pipe, a suitable perfume for heckles from a gentler era. “Intae these chanty-wrastlers!” is about as fire and brimstone as he gets.

Ian Nicolson, a zealous convert to Queen’s Park after a lifetime as a Hibee, had emailed me to say that the supporters’ bus was the best in Scotland. “To really get being a football fan, you need to experience an away day,” he had written. “I’d like to think we’re civilised drunks. While a bevvy is taken, we can still discuss the finer points of Marxist philosophy, alongside the collected works of Mark E Smith.” He might have added that the conversation would likely also touch on Tony Benn’s diaries, Nick Cave’s music, and the best episode of Columbo. Opinions on these matters varied widely, but a touching moment of unity occurred when, while passing the entrance to Donald Trump’s golf course, everyone rushed over and gave the sign the finger.

In some ways, this journey was the point, rather than the match itself. Queen’s were not expected to win. This is very different from supporting a big club, where defeats are regarded as intolerable humiliations. Everyone on this bus had experience of relegation, had known the black moods that accompanied losses. Yet there was an awareness that this was part of what it meant to support the team: trial by ordeal. “We’ve had more bad years than good, and you just thole it [put up with it],” said Keith McAllister, a 59-year-old accountant with a Shakespearean beard and a stoic bent who has been head of the supporters’ association since he was 15. “Win or lose, I enjoy the day.”

Keith hasn’t missed a game, home or away, since 1979. “Three o’clock on a Saturday, this is what I do. I’ve told my daughter, ‘If you get married on a Saturday, I might not be there.’” He is quite serious about this. He seems a reasonable, thoroughly decent man, yet he has this compulsion at the centre of his life. He showed me a tattoo on the inside of his left forearm: a white rose and a few lines of romantic verse by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. This reminds him of a love affair, his feelings for Scotland, and what it is to follow Queen’s Park. “You know it’s going to break your heart, but that’s OK. You’re happy to take the lows, because you know you’re going to get the huge highs. That’s football. That’s my team.”

‘Football is still, for many people, about family and place.’ Photograph: Robert Ormerod/The Guardian

We arrived at Balmoor about an hour before kick-off. It was a bright day. Seagulls ghosted overhead. Stovies were on sale in the clubhouse at 50p a helping. Scottish country dance music came lilting over the PA, lending a romantic air to the views of pebbledashed houses and the power station. Percussion was provided by the home fans banging pitchside advertising hoardings for a funeral director and the Press And Journal. Here, perhaps because they were away from the civilising influence of the Vicar, who no longer makes these long trips, the Queen’s supporters were less genteel. Shouts of encouragement (“’Mon the Spiders!”) mingled with rhetorical enquiries directed at the referee – “How’s he offside, ya fuckin’ walloper?” – and the keening of the gulls.

After the long, boozy trip north, the game went by in a flash. Queen’s missed an early penalty and were punished for it, conceding two goals in the second half. The fans, loyal to the last, applauded their team off the pitch, but the mood on the bus home was subdued and reflective. I admired these men, their commitment and companionship, but I could not yet share their faith.

“Sometimes,” Higgy said, “I take a walk to what’s left of Cathkin Park, Third Lanark’s old ground.” Third Lanark were one of Scotland’s great early teams, but went under in 1967. Remarkably, the Glasgow ground is still there, and it’s a melancholy, haunted place. The stone terraces are mossy and slippy with fallen leaves, broken in places by great thrusting groves of poplar, hornbeam, sycamore and ash. A magpie prattles like a football rattle.

“I’m an atheist,” Higgy continued, “but it’s kind of like a church for me. It’s quiet and there’s nobody about, so I do a lot of thinking there. I’ll sit on the bit of terracing that’s left and think, ‘This could be my team. This could be Queen’s just disappeared. What would I do?’” He spreads his hands, shakes his head, clearing the dark thoughts. “I don’t know: maybe we’re all just nuts.”

***

Driving down from Glasgow, I passed the spot. On a sloping grass verge of the roundabout, where in newspaper photographs the bus lay tipped on its side, there was now a shrine. Flowers and football tops. The red, white and blue. Two weeks before, here on the A76 between Mauchline and Kilmarnock, a coach carrying Rangers fans to a match against Partick Thistle came off the road and overturned, injuring several and resulting in the death of one man, 39-year-old Ryan Baird.

He was from the village of Magheramorne in Northern Ireland, and the funeral would be held there; an Orange ceremony was planned, with regalia worn and the Rangers manager Mark Warburton in attendance. I was on my way to the memorial service, in the Dumfries and Galloway town of Sanquhar, where Baird had made his home. He worked as a joiner, had two sons and was engaged to be married.

Outside St Bride’s, a pretty, 19th-century church, Billy McLeod was shaking hands, welcoming folk. A stocky man of 55, McLeod played for Ipswich Town, Partick Thistle and Queen of the South in the late 70s and early 80s. These days he is a stalwart member of Nith Valley Loyal, the Rangers supporters’ club that had been travelling on the bus that day. He wore a dark suit and a Rangers scarf. His face bore an expression of grim compassion. It seemed clear that he was suffering, but you had no doubt that he would do his duty by the friend he had lost and by his fellow club members.

A banner tied to a fence outside the church displayed the red hand of Ulster and the words Prod Boys On Tour. Inside, the pews were full. A couple of hundred people at least. A Rangers song played on the PA and some of the mourners sang under their breath, tapping their feet softly on the wooden floor: “We love to see the lasses with the blue scarves on, we love to hear the boys all roar.”

The public response to the crash had been remarkably ecumenical. Rival football clubs and fans offered condolences, and Rod Stewart, one of Celtic’s best known supporters, made a donation to a fund set up in the aftermath. Yet in St Bride’s there was a sense of a distinct people grieving for one of their own. Almost everyone was wearing Rangers colours over their funeral clothes. One woman wore an orange scarf on which the words No Surrender were written in gothic script. It’s a contentious slogan with a particular historical and religious context going back to the 17th century; many people would consider it anti-Catholic, a provocative and inappropriate thing to wear. But here, in Sanquhar, it seemed to take on another, better meaning: defiance in the face of tragedy.

Large windows on the north side of the church showed the Lowther hills. The music ended and the Rev William Hogg, a kindly-looking man with a grey beard, began his sermon. “You are wondering and I am wondering,” he said, “where are the words of comfort in the face of such a painful loss? Someone you have cared about and respected has had his life ended in a moment of utter disaster. We cannot and must not avoid saying that.”

Partick fans get ready: ‘We’re looking for a win.’ Photograph: Robert Ormerod/The Guardian

The minister wore a blue stole over his vestments. Not quite the right shade, he admitted, but it felt an appropriate gesture. “In modern Christian thinking, blue is the colour of hope, of the sky, of heaven above. I assume that any football fan knows everything about hope. You can experience it minute by minute during a match or season. It is on that hope, that promise, that we rely this morning, as we commend Ryan to God’s safe keeping. And we have, as a reminder, the blue.”

Football fans in Scotland, Rangers supporters in particular, often get a bad name. While this may, at times, be well deserved, what I saw in Sanquhar was a side of fandom that is less often acknowledged. Football is tribal, which can be problematic because tribes define themselves against other groups and cultures, hence sectarianism, violence and all that rank rottenness. But a tribe is also a kind of family, which means solidarity, sticking together. It means a scarf around the neck, an arm around the shoulder. We Are The People, the Rangers fans sing; another contentious phrase, yet it has become clear that, in the darkest hour, “we” is the important word.

There were a lot of people in that church who had been hurt, physically and emotionally, in the bus crash. But they had come together, based around a shared love of football, of club, to offer each other comfort. This is passion. Harry Bingo feels it. Higgy and the Vicar feel it. Ryan Baird, surely, felt it too.

I don’t. Not yet. Maybe I never will. But perhaps it is not such a small thing, a privilege even, that I am able to sense it in others and can write here Billy McLeod’s words when he told me what it has been like to return to Ibrox since the crash. It has meant getting back on a coach and passing the crash site, which cannot be easy, but it has meant, too, a feeling of unity and love; the embrace of something bigger. “It’s comforting,” he said. “People at the games see our Nith Valley badges on our tops and jackets and instantly recognise that we were the club that were in the crash. It was a tragedy, it was an ill-fated day. It’s been difficult for the boys that were on the bus, and difficult for some that weren’t and feel terrible guilt. This supporters’ club has been put on the map for a reason we didn’t want, but the tragedy has brought our community closer together, and the big Rangers family has been absolutely amazing.”

Afterwards, after the hymns and prayers, the dark vale and falling eventide, we walked outside and lined the mossy kirkyard path as the coffin was carried shoulder high to the hearse. It was a bright day, and, in the mourning hush, the noise of kids playing football drifted up the hill from the school. Shouts and whistles; sniffs and sobs; death and life. No surrender.

• A longer version of this article will appear next month in Nutmeg, the Scottish football periodical.