This was the second time in seven months that Hill has come close to the death chamber: last July he was spared by just 90 minutes and the experience was repeated on Tuesday night with just 30 minutes to go.
So far, we've been spared any plugs for athletes' personal sponsors because the Olympic branding rules forbid them (to keep the field clear for overall advertisers such as Coca Cola and Adidas).
The conversation starts at battle speed and soon changes up to full Glaswegian ramming rate: nothing is missed and no one is spared.
Congerton will have the job of identifying a long-term head coach, having hoped that Advocaat might have spared him that difficult task.
And voters will be spared a Hobson's choice, with the option of coming out of Europe with the loss of investment and jobs that would entail, or staying in but with key rights such as paid holidays, gender equality and protection for agency workers stripped away.
Aleksander Rajcevic and, more critically, Luka Zahovic should even have extended that lead but the teenage striker skied over the bar from inside the six-yard box and the visitors were spared their humiliation.
I was not spared: the guard kept hitting me on my head and squeezing my neck against the rear end of the other detainee.
According to the family, the Kennedys were among those due to be cleared from the land in the early part of the 19th century, bound for Canada, but were spared and moved into what would become their long-term home in 1801.
A winter that has largely spared the north-eastern US is about to arrive with gusto: a storm the National Weather Service (NWS) called "potentially historic" could dump 2ft to 3ft of snow from northern New Jersey to Connecticut.
More than 3000 people rallied in Sydney against funding cuts at the ABC amid fears that few areas of the public broadcaster will be spared.
The chorus of criticism from the eastern periphery of the eurozone meant that the usual suspects – Wolfgang Schäuble of Germany and eurogroup chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem of the Netherlands – were spared the need to issue their usual dire warnings to the Greeks.
