The substitution he still replays

A volunteer who coaches a children's football team in Giza can describe, minute by minute, the final his side lost three seasons ago. He made a substitution too late. He has gone over it more times than he can count.

What he has never once thought about is everything he did not do. He never asked the girls who watch from the fence whether they wanted a team of their own. He never wrote down the drills that work, so another parent could run a second side. He never asked the club for the empty pitch on Saturday mornings. Any one of those was worth far more than one cup final.

This is how most of us keep score. The errors that keep us awake are the ones we were standing next to: the wrong figure on an invoice, a message sent to the wrong person, a price quoted too low. We feel them because our hand was on them.

The bigger losses leave no mark. Nobody sends a bill for the market we never walked into, the introduction we never asked for, the thing we never made. They usually cost far more than the slips, and they took no more effort to miss than the slips took to make.

Worse, the attention trains us. Every hour spent on the near misses makes us more careful about what we can see going wrong, and more blind to what never happened at all.

The late substitution lost one afternoon. The team he never started has been missing for three seasons.