“I might have changed, but that did not mean the sport had.”

“If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.”

“Forever did not mean what it once had. Forever was what changed inevitably over time.”

“All day she had been dreaming of the comet, its wild and fiery beauty, what it might mean, how her life might change.”

“Yet this wasn’t like sports, let alone sports movies. The roles weren’t fixed, nor the meaning of the scaffolding. It didn’t have to be this way. They might have, for instance, all felt stronger. They might have felt stronger and come together. They might have decided that, rather than now, as they’d been mistaken before: that if their enemies cheered the same damage as they, then they weren’t their enemies after all. They might have concluded their interests were mutual, that some other force, earlier—some other enemy—had confused and divided them, and that all those who cheered were thus allies unmasked.Instead they felt bitter, tricked by each other, last-strawed underdogs, suckers on the mend. Their enmity swelled and they fought even harder.”

“I had no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.”