It was a match that illustrated how fine is the line between winning and losing in a mere best-of-five contest.
Sometimes, he said, mere silence works best.
But these accounts are mere descriptions at best and not scientific theories.
What was once considered a mere nuisance, at best, has become a huge problem for businesses and the public.
And the latest Newspaper Association of America review of the year shows press revenues dropped a mere 2%, the best result since 2006.
Curiosity-driven research, supported by peer review, goes beyond mere instrumentalism – the best ideas are often generated by the search for new knowledge in a totally unrelated area.
Then as now, assessing how many home runs players would or should have hit under different conditions are mere estimates at best, and that's when the factor at play is admitted and obvious.
Some toreros and bullfighting aficionados have never accepted them, seeing them as mere novelties at best or as trespassers on a sacred male domain at worst; from this perspective, the women should stick to their traditional role in the corrida, that of "beautiful spectator".
Indeed, for all the comparisons that this exhibition evokes between sound and image, it also reminds us that the words or pictures we use to try to make music concrete are always, at their very best, mere approximations, intimations, fumbling in the semantic darkness.
This, together with his gargantuan output - he was working right up to his Aids-related death, aged 31, in 1990 - led to an overexposure that has caused some to write off his work as at best mere graphics, at worst tacky doodles.
