And the arena's announcer, Michael Baiamonte, who is infamous for his screaming introductions (which he sometimes repeats a half-dozen times per game) and his nonstop histrionics, was also a bit more restrained Sunday night.
Perhaps, that is why the NYPD was more restrained Friday night and backed down with threatened arrests of a group of activist bicyclists called Critical Mass, that had shown up to show solidarity.
The police fired into crowds Saturday, killing 9 people and wounding 81, all by gunshots, but were more restrained on Sunday, as representatives of the protesters met with government officials in an effort to defuse the violence.
They are certainly more restrained than Sunday, who admitted to having prayed for a divine push while chasing fly balls.
Solzhenitsyn had, after all, made his name in 1962 as author of a concise, restrained story, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", the first Soviet literary treatment of life inside a Stalinist labour camp.
Taxi drivers were quick to seize on the city's more restrained tone on Friday as evidence that its numbers could not be trusted.
The uneasy national view of the Afghan conflict was reflected in the restrained temper of Friday's moving but troubling service of commemoration in St Paul's Cathedral.
THE contrast is so New York: on one block on a recent sunny Saturday, restrained crowds of grown-ups in dark glasses waited for outdoor tables at Pastis, a hot see-and-be-seen restaurant in the ultra-hip Gansevoort Market meatpacking district.
Professor Issacharoff of Columbia said the differences in the two types of legal proceedings might not mean that the Florida court was insulated from receiving criticism from the majority of the Washington justices that could be much harsher than the restrained questions last Monday.
President Donald Trump, a summa cum laude graduate of this particular school of masculinity, reportedly disliked Kavanaugh's restrained, anodyne interview Monday on Fox News.
