Their struggles are decades past, their money and marriages made or lost, their paths long taken.
If they lose, their path to the playoffs is muddied.
Yet the sense of anguish is considerable, bearing in mind they have lost their opening match and the path out of Group D looks increasingly hazardous.
Among the key lessons are that a struggling economy, an unaccountable, incompetent government and a dissolute, flaccid party whose members have strayed from the true path and lost their faith doomed the Soviet Union.
Many of those who, like Smokes, chose the rougher path either lost their lives or, like Smash are locked up in prison and therefore invisible.
When the thousands of pounds of explosives detonated, they had saved fifty Marines and Iraqi police who would have been in the truck's path, but Corporal Yale and Lance Corporal Haerter lost their own lives.
Pain that some of my people chose the path of terror and lost their humanity.
Going down that path, some lose their footing in the faith completely and live to regret it bitterly ever after.
But many politicians could have done worse — losing either the base or their path to the center, and gaining a landslide loss for their efforts.
Beginners, and some experienced riders, Mr. Collins said, tend to fall into three traps: They are hit by traffic turning across their path; they lose control on wet or greasy roads; or they disobey traffic laws and get into trouble, say, riding the wrong way on one-way streets.
