But as so often happened in this back-and-forth series, the downwind legs would hold the keys to victory.
"But, at the same time, we are all still creatures of Washington in the sense that when something happens like that" — the back-and-forth at the YouTube debate — "it lends itself to us thinking, Well, maybe that's something that we clarify, because the grownups in Washington were all saying you can't do that.
What did happen was a competitive, back-and-forth game in which Tottenham, playing without its American star, Clint Dempsey, found itself trailing by 2-1 deep in the second half, stymied by the excellent work of West Ham's Finnish goalkeeper, Jussi Jaaskelainen.
The whole experience is mostly just waiting for something interesting to happen, which means bouncing back-and-forth between boredom and creeping menace.
One way this happens spontaneously is through a back-and-forth dialogue that develops naturally between a parent and child sharing a book.
You could say the same of poetry, and there is something special about tennis, as poets have noticed, that feels poetic — the marked rectangle within which all the action happens, the quick back and forth of the ball like a line breaking and returning to the left-hand margin.
I was like, I don't know what's going to happen, and we were going back-and-forth with labels trying to figure out what I wanted to do," she said.
(In fact this has already happened once). Messages back and forth are also private and can take many forms, including texts, instant messages, email, phone calls, or whatever.
The realistic nature of his story, stumbling over what happened when, looping back and forth in time to pick up dropped threads, contributes to its impact: you could be in a New York bar, lending a sympathetic ear to a self-pitying tale of woe.
If they like what they're hearing and if there's a good back-and-forth happening, the meeting will stretch to an hour.
