My maternal grandmother made it to the ripe old age of 91 when she passed away almost six years ago.

Most of her days were spent cleaning; office buildings in the eerie dusk of the early hours of the morning, doctors’ surgeries, chapel houses - all were left gleaming and shining under her touch well into her 70s. Like many of her generation who went out to work while still in the grip of childhood to help feed the mouths of large working class families, she had cause to ponder what other hand life might have dealt had she had access to a full education.

Access to the books and the library and indeed the very luxury of time to absorb the lessons in them was taken for granted by her far more pampered and cosseted grandchildren who had the sheer luck to live in another time.

It was with some interest this week that I observed shifting sands in my own time. It may have felt largely insignificant to see women footballers celebrating their triumph on the backpages of the national press but to some of us it there was a time when such a scene was as desperately improbable as a matriculation card to a working-class female was in another era.

Charting the dancing and singing of a group of young women this week as they bounced around a changing room, enjoying their moment, savouring what it meant to be the first-ever Scots who will be in attendance at next year’s women’s World Cup in France seemed to pen a new and intriguing note.

It was difficult not to look at the narrative and contemplate a small step towards the greater good, another little bit of progress. For football does not exist in a bubble; no sport does. It is life in microcosm with its politics and all.

It is not so long ago that the images would have stayed behind closed doors, that the stories within them would not have made it into the mainstream news.

Indeed, Lisa Evans who plays for Scotland and Arsenal, commented after the successful qualification game as the squad returned to Glasgow airport from Albania that being greeted on landing by reporters and cameras was an entirely new experience altogether.

No-one will be fooled. The men’s A game in Scotland struggles to attract sponsorship and interest at times so the women’s game will forever be up against it, but this week seemed to suggest a more equitable look at a sport that has been entrenched to a definition of Scottish ideas of masculinity for as long as it has been at the forefront of the entertainment industry.

In my own time I have been able to chart the change in attitude towards the game. In my first year of secondary school I was banned from playing football by a male PE teacher who was contemptuous and suspicious of an 11-year-old female with an interest in the sport.

There's encouragement for you, eh?

It would be years later when the library tomes offered stories of Dick Kerr’s Ladies and then, later again, when I would hear the rarely told story of Stewarton born Rose Reilly and ponder my own what-ifs.

For an entire generation now there is visibility of women playing football and that in itself is impossible to under-estimate in terms of role models, of accessibility and of simple day-to-day-normality.

It is 20 years since Scotland’s men last qualified for a major football tournament. Where they have regressed, the women’s game has made great strides.

Those of us who will huddle in the pressbox at Hampden tonight will have cause to ponder whether that will be changing any time soon given the evidence that was served up on Friday night against Belgium.

Gratitude might be overplaying the hand when it comes to appreciating the magnitude of the job Shelley Kerr has done with the female team. But what they have achieved before kicking a ball in France is pretty weighty.