Costa Rican referee Luis Paulino Siles emerged from his dressing room and walked between the two sets of players standing on either side of the blisteringly hot tunnel inside Estadio Benito Villamarin in Seville, stopping when he reached the front of the line.
Bearded Brazilian captain Sócrates (full name: Doctor Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira) stood to his left, all six-foot-four of this chain-smoking, beer-drinking behemoth of a man, his thin white armband wrapped tightly around a bulging left bicep, akin to a tourniquet he might have applied during his medical studies at the University of São Paulo five years previously.
And Graeme Souness -- the moustachioed Scottish skipper with the tight perm, a penchant for tackles that extended beyond the letter of the law and just plain old 'James' for his middle name -- was standing to the referee's right, immediately in front of Alan Rough. The former goalkeeper takes up the story...
"The ref came forward and I heard him say to the two captains, 'Look, this is a very important game and I hope everything goes alright. May the best team win,'" Rough told Frank McAvennie recently on his Let's Be Frank podcast. "Graeme Souness turned round to me and said four words: 'I f---ing hope not!'"
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Contenders (Scotland), ready? Gladiators (Brazil), ready?
It was like a scene from the popular Saturday evening ITV show in the '90s.
This was the second of four World Cup meetings between Scotland and Brazil (two more would follow in 1990 and 1998) after their goalless draw in Frankfurt in June 1974. Souness didn't make his international debut until October later that year so this was his first time facing the Seleção.
"Seville in the summer is stinking hot," said Souness, speaking on BBC Radio Scotland. "We came in from the warm-up and looked like we'd already played 90 minutes and extra time. The boys were putting their heads under the cold shower to try and cool down. And the match hadn't even started yet!
"I'm looking along the line at the Brazil players during the national anthems and they look like they've come straight from a shop window. Immaculate. I'm looking at our lads; we're all covered in sweat, with bright red faces, and there's wee Gordon [Strachan] smiling and waving to the camera and I'm thinking 'we're snookered here.'
"Then David Narey goes and scores and we go 1-0 up. It was like pulling a tiger's tail!"
The equivalent of the Contender getting a free hit to poke the Gladiator with the pugil stick without admonishment from TV ref John Anderson, even with the knowledge the Gladiator will most likely exact their revenge and then some.
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Scotland were mostly under the cosh for the first quarter of an hour in Seville and then, a couple of minutes later, Narey's lash with his right foot from the edge of the box poked, nay prodded, the big yellow bear in opposition. Cue BBC commentator John Motson...
"Souness... looks for Wark... Narey's coming through from right-back... NAREY!!! Tremendous goal for the Scots. Narey saw the space and found the top corner..."
A '"toe-poke" according to Motson's BBC colleague Jimmy Hill -- "he just said that to wind the Scots up," Alan Hansen joked to STV -- but Sócrates himself revealed to The Scotsman during a 2004 visit to a Brazilian soccer school at Portobello beach near Edinburgh(!), that a toe-poke in Brazil is actually considered a thing of beauty and even has its own name -- a 'biquinho'.
"We weren't preoccupied by going behind because we were very confident," said Socrates in 2004. "We were one of the best teams in the world. We were Brazil. It wasn't a problem."
He was right. Of course he was right. Tigers (or big yellow bears) don't take kindly to having their tails pulled by strangers.
"The only thing we did wrong was annoy them by scoring a goal they would have been proud to claim as one of their own," Souness told the Daily Record in 2012. "After that, they gave us a chasing and it was too hot to be running around chasing shadows."
Four goals without reply -- Zico (33'), Oscar (48'), Éder (63'), Falcão (87') -- secured the win for Brazil, after which Sócrates was selected for an anti-doping test. Severely dehydrated, but with liquids in short supply, the Brazilian captain managed to persuade the doping control officer to take him to a hospitality suite next door.
"When the fridge was opened, I tried to hide my smile," the great man recalled in Andrew Downie's 2017 book 'Doctor Sócrates'. "It was filled with all kinds of drinks. It was beautiful!
"I drank all the beer and then I moved on to champagne. Nothing. Wine, nothing. It was only three hours later that they got their sample."
Trust the doctor to find the perfect medicine.
España '82 will always be remembered in Scotland for David Narey's spectacular 'biquinho' against Brazil, especially because it helps the Tartan Army forget about the rest of the 4-1 thumping suffered at the hands of "the best team never to have won a World Cup," according to Gordon Strachan.
"At the final whistle, Kenny [Dalglish], who'd come on as a sub, went to Zico and tried to get his shirt," recalled John Wark to the BBC. "Big [Alan] Hansen sprinted over to try and get it too -- it was probably the closest he got to him all night!
"But Zico fobbed them both off and came over to me instead. 'Swap?' he says. Turns out he just collected No. 10s -- so when I got back into the dressing room I was waving it in Hansen's face. I actually ended up giving it away to a charity in Ipswich and it made a lot of money at an auction."
Many have had their say about Narey's thunderbolt, from his Scotland teammates on that sweltering day in Seville to the Brazilians in opposition who were annoyed by his audacity to score a Brazilian-style golazo against them, but there's one man who has never publicly said a word about it: the goalscorer himself.
Still living in the same house in Dundee that he lived in when he played for Dundee United from 1973 to 1994, Narey, who celebrated his 70th birthday earlier this month with very little fuss, has politely turned down every single request for an interview about scoring that goal. The last interview recorded in print was in The Weekly News in 1980 -- two years before the World Cup in Spain.
We do know one little nugget, however, thanks to close friends spilling the beans; Narey tried to watch the goal again upon his return from Spain in 1982... but his wife had taped over the match with an episode of Coronation Street!
And so to Wednesday evening in Miami and part five of Scotland vs. Brazil at the World Cup. There will be clear similarities with Seville as far as the weather is concerned -- sweltering heat and oppressive humidity -- and while the Scots might not have as many players of the calibre of their team in 1982, neither will the Brazilians.
A draw between the Contenders and the Gladiators would secure Scotland's place in the knockout stage of the tournament for the first time ever. And if the game does end up all-square, then Steve Clarke would prefer it to finish goalless. History has shown what can happen when the Scots score first against Brazil and the tiger's tail gets pulled.
May the best team win.
