Medical Files and Football: When Ligaments Write the Verdict Before the Opening Whistle

Kazan, 7:42 p.m., June 26, 2026.

I stood about fifteen meters from the touchline, behind the plastic-covered benches, and I saw something no television camera ever paused long enough to capture. Son Heung-min walked out of the tunnel. He walked normally, if you only looked at his upper body. Shoulders straight, head up, arms swinging naturally. But I was not looking at his upper body. I was looking at his right foot. His right heel landed about a tenth of a second earlier than his left, and when it landed, his right knee dipped further than normal — a small dip, almost imperceptible, the kind team doctors call a "compensatory sign."

That night, the South Korean national team played Germany. That night, Son scored in the 96th minute. That night, the reigning world champions were eliminated in the group stage. And for three years afterward, people kept retelling that match as a fairy tale — a miracle, a moment of collective will, a night when football gave back to the Korean people what the world had taken from them.

I do not retell it that way. In the internal memo I wrote at two in the morning the next day, the first line I typed was: "This match was decided before the referee blew the opening whistle, and it was decided by a ligament on the outside of the right ankle."

That is how I work. That is how I have worked for more than fifty years. I do not write about goals. I write about the mechanism that produces goals — and that mechanism, more often than not, lies inside a medical file that someone signed and decided did not matter.

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Context: The Man Who Sits Between Two Rooms

I was born in Argentina. I grew up with football as a religion without scripture, sustained only by Saturday afternoons in the neighborhood and an old radio in the kitchen. But I did not become a commentator. When I entered journalism in 2026 at the Newark Advertiser, I realized I did not care about describing what people had already seen. I cared about explaining what they had seen but failed to notice.

Years later, I moved to South Korea, settled in Incheon, and began a strange job for which I still have not found the correct name in any language: team-doctor liaison reporter. I do not belong to the press room. I do not belong to the medical room. I sit in between, where the two sides frequently do not speak the same language, even when they are both speaking Korean.

My job, simple to the point of being irritating, is to ask the first question nobody wants to hear: what is the root mechanism? Not what the injury is. Not how long the player will be out. But: what actually happened inside the body, and how do we know?

Over the course of my career, I have learned one thing I believe to the end: a medical file never lies; only the person who signs beneath it does. A ligament cannot read a contract. A meniscus does not care about transfer value. An ankle has no loyalty to any club. The athlete's body speaks only one language — the language of load and tolerance — and it always tells the truth, even when it tells it in a language that humans need three months to understand.

This article is not a summary. I am sixty-eight, and I have learned that summaries are rarely correct. This is a data report, written to answer one question: injuries do not determine outcomes, but injuries are a probabilistic variable inside a tactical context, and what we call a "miracle" is often just a probabilistic variable that has been misread.

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Core I: The Lesson from Incheon and the Brazilian Striker with No Meniscus

Summer 2026. Incheon United signed a Brazilian striker named Lucas Oliveira, number 9, from a third-tier Portuguese league. I remember the transfer fee exactly because I wrote it in my notebook the same day: not large by European standards, but for a struggling K League club, it was a gamble.

As a team-doctor liaison reporter, I was permitted to see the medical examination file before the contract was completed. This is a rare privilege, and I have always treated it as a heavier responsibility than a professional advantage. I read every page. The file showed a small surgical scar on the player's right knee, sitting at the classic site of arthroscopic meniscus surgery. Yet in the declared history section, he had written "no prior surgery."

That was a contradiction. And in medicine, the contradiction between what you see and what you are told is not a matter of honesty. It is a matter of mechanism: if the meniscus has been operated on, the remaining volume and position of the cartilage have changed, and therefore the load-bearing points of the knee have changed.

I spent a month watching forty-seven of the player's old matches. I logged every sprint above threshold, every sudden change of direction, every jumping collision, and I plotted a correlation between running intensity and the knee-pain signs I inferred from his posture on the pitch. The graph was ugly. It showed a clear pattern: whenever the player performed more than three high-speed changes of direction within ten minutes, his running posture deviated by roughly two to three degrees in the second half. That is a compensation mechanism. The body was protecting itself, and the price of that self-protection was performance.

I sent the memo to the coaching staff. I did not write "do not sign." I wrote: "If you sign, cap him below sixty minutes per match, and accept that he will never reach the form the scouts promised." I received no reply.

The club signed him anyway.

The result, according to data I have kept: Lucas Oliveira played nine matches, a total of six hundred and seventy-six minutes, scoring two goals. Then the right knee flared, he required surgery again, and his professional career ended far earlier than his thirties. There was no technical accident here. No collision. Just a medical file that was not read carefully, and a signature placed for reasons unrelated to medicine.

A medical file is the only thing at the negotiating table that cannot be negotiated. You can negotiate the price. You can negotiate the contract length. You can negotiate release clauses and sell-on percentages. But you cannot negotiate with a meniscus. A meniscus does not know how much you paid for it.

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Core II: The Anatomy of an Ankle and the Number 38 Degrees

To understand the night in Kazan, you must understand something most spectators are never taught: this ligament is not a thread. It is a three-dimensional structure, and ankle injuries happen along three mechanically distinct directions.

The first is inversion, when the foot rolls inward and the heel turns outward. This direction damages the lateral ligament complex, and it is the most common ankle injury in football — roughly three-quarters of all cases.

The second is eversion, when the foot rolls outward. Rarer, but more severe, because it often involves the deltoid ligament on the inside and can be accompanied by fracture.

The third is the high ankle sprain, where damage lies in the ligament connecting the tibia and fibula. This one haunts professional football the most, because its recovery time is three to four times longer than an ordinary sprain, and its recurrence rate is nearly impossible to predict precisely with standard imaging tools.

The biomechanical safety threshold I use in my analysis — and I know this is an empirical threshold, not a law — sits around twenty-five to thirty degrees of inversion. Below that, most of the ligament remains intact and the body can handle the damage with an ordinary inflammatory response within seven to ten days. Above forty degrees, the probability of complete ligament rupture is very high and surgical intervention is required.

But there is a gray zone. The zone between thirty and forty degrees. That is the zone where the medical file says "grade two sprain," the player says "I'm fine," the coach says "he'll play," and nobody truly knows how the body will respond in the next forty-eight hours.

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Core III: The Night in Kazan and the 38-Degree Angle

June 2026, at the training ground in Kazan, I watched Son Heung-min train after a challenge from a Swedish defender in the previous match. He was limping. Not much. Just enough that an ordinary observer would think he was trying to look fine.

The South Korean national team doctor diagnosed a mild grade-one sprain, two to three days' rest. I requested the slow-motion wide-angle clip of the collision. No clip was provided publicly, but I found footage from the stands, low quality, shot from behind the goal. I slowed it to a quarter speed, laid a grid over the frame, and measured the inversion angle of the right ankle. I calculated thirty-eight degrees.

Thirty-eight degrees is not a grade-one sprain. It sits deep in the gray zone I just described. But here there was a variable that standard models do not account for: the individual player's calf-muscle structure. Son Heung-min has an abnormally thick calf mass for his positional standard, and — more importantly — he has a neuromuscular activation pattern that allows him to fire his compensatory muscle groups faster than average. In other words, his body has the capacity to transfer load away from the injured ankle toward neighboring muscle groups at short notice.

I wrote an internal analysis and sent it to the team medical room. I predicted, as a probability, that Son would still start against Germany, and that if he did, his sprint output in the first half would drop by roughly fifteen percent against the previous match, but his finishing ability inside the box in the closing minutes would not drop, because the compensation mechanism works best when the body is resting, and in the final minutes of a tense match the deciding factor is no longer speed but position.

The next evening, I argued with the team doctor. He said I was working with incomplete data. I agreed. I always agree with that. "Based on my current data," I said, "the probability he plays is around sixty percent, and the probability he scores is around eighteen percent." He looked at me as if I had said something blasphemous. Perhaps I had. In football, attaching a number to a sacred moment is considered an insult.

Son played. He scored in the ninety-sixth minute, after Germany had already conceded once and were pushing their entire shape forward chasing an equalizer. His goal sealed the 2-0. Germany were eliminated. An entire nation wept.

I did not weep. I opened my laptop and updated my model. The eighteen percent had happened. That is what probability always does: it does not lie, it merely says that eighteen percent is a small number but not zero.

Son Heung-min's right ankle beat Germany before the ball rolled. Not because it was healthy. But because it was weak in a specific way, and that specific way forced the body to fire a compensation chain that, in the circumstances of that match, became an advantage.

The 2026 World Cup had no miracle, only an ankle taped with will. And will, in the end, is also a measurable biological phenomenon.

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Core IV: The Summer of 2026 and Eight Months of ACL in Empty Stadiums

March 2026, world football stopped. Leagues suspended. Stadiums empty. Training grounds closed. And while most of my colleagues wrote pieces about the silence, I began a project I had been nursing for years.

I extracted the entire public injury dataset of the five major European leagues from 2026 to 2026. I had no access to any club's medical database — and I would not accept it if offered, because that is the players' data. But I had something else: official injury reports, player ages, match counts, rest days between matches, and fixture calendars.

I built the model by hand. Two thousand three hundred and eighteen injury cases. I classified them by injury type, by age band, by position, and by prior competitive disruption.

The result, published in November 2026, was this: in teams with a competitive and training disruption exceeding ninety days, the rate of anterior cruciate ligament rupture rose by twenty-three point four percent against the equivalent period in previous seasons. The increase was especially pronounced in players over twenty-eight and in players with prior knee injury history.

The mechanism here is not mysterious. The ACL does not rupture because it is weak. It ruptures because there is a desynchronization between neural signal and muscular response. After a long competitive break, the neuromuscular system loses part of its synchronization capacity, and when a player returns at high intensity, the window between foot strike and bodily response lengthens by a few percentage points of a second. Those few percentage points of a second, at professional level, are enough for the ligament to bear a load it was never designed to bear.

My article, in Vietnam and in Korea, was doubted. I am not a doctor. I have never been a doctor. I am a journalist, and in many eyes a journalist has no right to speak about biomechanics. Three months later, a UEFA study published a near-equivalent figure: twenty-one point seven percent. Nobody apologized. But data does not need apologies. Data only needs to be read.

Eight months of ACL in empty stadiums: injury does not need an audience to exist. That is what I want carved into the mind of everyone who reads football. Injury does not know the league has been suspended. Injury does not know the stands are empty. Ligaments still rupture in silence, in empty gyms, on mornings nobody films.

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Core V: Lee Kang-in and the Other Side of the Cortisone Injection

November 2026. Before the group-stage match against Uruguay at the World Cup, midfielder Lee Kang-in, number 18, was suffering from inflammation of the periosteum of the lumbar spine. The diagnosis is not common in football, but it is not rare either. It is an inflammatory condition of the membrane surrounding bone, and it causes a particular kind of pain — a dull ache at rest, a sharp sting on sudden rotation.

The national team medical room proposed a local cortisone injection to enable the player to take the field. This is a widespread practice in professional football, and I understand why it exists. The World Cup comes only once every four years. A twenty-one-year-old player may have only three or four chances in an entire career. Cortisone reduces inflammation quickly, reduces pain quickly, and enables the player to play within forty-eight hours.

I objected.

Not on an abstract ethical principle. But because of my own data. In the database I had built since 2026, I had tracked cases of local cortisone injection for soft-tissue and periosteal injuries. Based on my current data, the recurrence rate within six weeks after injection in this group was forty-one percent. Forty-one percent is not a destiny. But it is a number a twenty-one-year-old player deserves to know before deciding.

I wrote a memo. I sent it up to the federation. I knew it would not change the decision. But I sent it anyway, for one reason only: if the worst happened, someone in this world had to have said it beforehand, so that later nobody could claim that nobody knew.

Lee Kang-in received the injection. He played three group-stage matches and scored one goal. It was one of the finest moments I have seen a young player produce under national pressure. After the tournament, he missed fourteen matches for Mallorca due to recurrence. The following season, according to my tracking, his total days lost to related issues came to one hundred and eighty-seven days.

Many in the industry said I was too mechanical. They said I did not understand that football is not merely biomechanics. I understand that better than they think. I have lived sixty-eight years in this sport, and I know that at that moment, at that age, a player will always choose the injection. I know that. But knowing in advance what will happen and understanding why someone still does it are two different things. I do not blame Lee Kang-in. I blame a system that did not give him enough information to make an informed choice.

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Contrarian I: The Lying Number of Distance Covered

There is one metric that broadcasters adore, and that I hate more than any other in modern football: distance covered.

Every big match, the screen flashes a number: player X ran twelve point three kilometers. The commentator nods. The viewer nods. The number is presented as proof of effort, of dedication, of a heart that never quits.

That is a confusion between quantity and quality.

Ineffective running also produces pretty numbers. A midfielder who runs thirteen kilometers in a match his team loses 0-3 may be a player who ran thirteen kilometers chasing a ball he never touched. Conversely, a center-back who runs nine kilometers in a 1-0 win may be the most important player on the pitch, simply because he was in the right place in every situation.

I always ask: distance covered where? In what state of the match? At what speed? How many seconds after the previous sprint?

The second thing I always ask: sprint count. This is a more valuable metric than distance covered, but it is also misread in a dangerous way. A player who sprints twenty times in a match is often praised. But if those twenty sprints occur in the first thirty minutes, then those twenty sprints are not an indicator of fitness. They are an indicator of tactical ignorance, and they are an indicator of injury risk.

From a sports-medicine standpoint, what truly matters is not total distance, but the distribution of load over time, the recovery window between sprints, and the degree of synchronization between bodily movement and match situation. An efficient mover is a player who moves less but more correctly. And in the medical file, an efficient mover is also a player who is injured less over the long term.

Based on my experience watching matches, clubs that use distance covered as a fitness evaluation metric typically ignore a far more important variable: resting heart-rate variability, and heart-rate recovery time after sprinting. These two metrics never appear on television. But they are injury predictors many times better than any kilometer figure.

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Contrarian II: The Comeback Timetable Is Controlled by the Press Office

There is a sentence coaches say at every pre-match press conference, and I have heard it thousands of times: "We will wait until the weekend to assess."

I understand why they say it. I understand there are tactical reasons not to reveal the state of the squad. But after more than fifty years of observation, I have distilled an empirical rule: "wait until the weekend" usually means the injury is not healed.

The phrasing has been polished over decades by club press offices, and it serves a dual function. First, it keeps the opponent from knowing the actual lineup. Second, it keeps the fans hopeful. And in a commercial environment, hope has economic value: ticket sales, shirt sales, sustained social-media attention.

But from a medical standpoint, the phrase often conceals a much simpler reality. When an injury has healed, clubs typically announce clearly: "Player X is ready to play." When an injury has clearly not healed, clubs say: "Wait until the weekend." Ambiguity is not necessarily a strategy. Sometimes it is merely a sign that the outcome is unknown — and an unknown outcome, in sports medicine, is often a bad sign.

More important is what I call the "staggered announcement effect." When a key player is injured, information is typically released in a very specific sequence: first the injury news, then an optimistic recovery estimate, then a revision to a longer estimate, and finally a prolonged silence until official word of the return date. The sequence repeats so regularly that I have begun to treat it as a data pattern rather than a coincidence.

A medical file is the only thing at the negotiating table that cannot be negotiated. And because it cannot be negotiated, it is presented to the public in a way designed to keep the number from speaking loudly. That is not a conspiracy. It is simply how the system operates.

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Contrarian III: Esports and the ACL That Is Never Recorded

I must speak about a field I have followed for years but written about little. Esports.

The career length of an esports professional is shorter than that of a footballer. That is a widely acknowledged fact. But there is another, less acknowledged fact: the sports-medicine system in this field is still young, and post-retirement support is nearly nonexistent.

Common esports injuries are not the same as football injuries. There is no ACL ruptured by a tackle. Instead, there is carpal tunnel syndrome, tendon damage from repetitive motion, lower-back pain from prolonged sitting, chronic eye strain, and sleep disruption from cross-timezone competition schedules.

But there is one mechanism I see repeated, and it is astonishingly similar to the ACL mechanism in football. It is not a mechanical mechanism, but a load mechanism. An esports professional competing at high intensity for many hours a day, six days a week, for years, with limited recovery capacity, will accumulate micro-damage in exactly the way a footballer accumulates micro-damage in a ligament. The body does not distinguish between a thirty-meter sprint and a five-hour practice session with mouse and keyboard. It only distinguishes between load and recovery capacity.

Football is a game of shadows: injury is the only light that cannot be hidden. In football, injury appears on television, in news bulletins, in interviews. In esports, injury often appears as a brief social-media statement: "Player X will take a break for health reasons." And then, usually, nothing more. No file, no long-term tracking, no analysis of whether the injury recurred.

That is why I believe esports needs a more serious sports-medicine system, and needs it sooner than many think. Not because esports players are weaker than footballers. But because they are younger, their careers are shorter, and when they retire at twenty-five, they will have to live with their bodies for the next fifty years.

Esports has its ACL too. It simply never gets an MRI.

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Core VI: Data Synthesis and the Risk Model

At this point I want to set out a composite risk model, built on all the data I have gathered over decades. This is not a prediction. It is an analytical framework for reading an injury and estimating probabilities.

Variable one: biological age of the tissue. Not the age on paper. A twenty-seven-year-old player can have the connective tissue of a thirty-five-year-old if he has played at high intensity since sixteen without adequate recovery periods.

Variable two: specific injury history. Not the number of injuries, but their location and type. A player who has previously injured his right ankle has a recurrence probability at that same ankle many times higher than a player who never has. This rule is so strong that, in my view, it should be a mandatory variable in every transfer decision.

Variable three: fixture density. The number of matches within thirty days is a more important indicator than the number across a season. The body tolerates total load far better than concentrated load.

Variable four: playing position and movement pattern. Not all positions bear the same load. A wide forward bears a different sprint load from a center-back, and a playmaking midfielder bears a different rotational load from a defensive midfielder.

Variable five: individual compensation capacity. This is the hardest variable to measure, but also the most important in the short term. It determines whether a player can take the field with an unhealed injury, and if so, for how long.

When I combine these five variables, I can derive a probability distribution for recovery time and recurrence risk. I never derive a single number. I only derive a distribution. And a distribution, in sports medicine as in football, is always the most honest answer.

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Core VII: Transfers, Summer and the Autumn of Injury

There is a period of the year when I work most: the summer transfer window. And there is a period of the year when I worry most: autumn.

Between the summer transfer window and the autumn of injury, the distance is one medical examination. I have seen this repeat so many times that it has become an almost unbreakable rule. A player is signed in July, debuts in August, and by November he has in his file an injury that should have been detected before the contract was signed.

Why does this happen? Not because team doctors are incompetent. Most team doctors I know are excellent specialists. The problem lies in the structure of the medical examination process, and in the incentives of those involved.

A typical transfer medical examination takes place over two to four hours. In that window, a doctor must assess a player he has never met. He has imaging tools, functional tests, and a history declaration provided by the player or his agent. That declaration is the fatal weak point, because it rests on voluntary honesty.

And here is what I want to state clearly: during contract negotiations, voluntary honesty is a scarce commodity. The player wants to move to a bigger club. The agent wants his commission. The selling club wants to sell. And among those four parties, only one — the buying club — has an incentive to detect the problem. That is a structural information asymmetry, and it is not solved by hiring more doctors. It is solved only by changing the process.

The approach I propose is whole-body MRI screening, not just the symptomatic region. The cost of such a scan, against the budget of a professional-level transfer, is negligible. And its value — in a case like Lucas Oliveira — cannot be measured in money.

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Core VIII: The Three Phases of an Injury

After many years, I classify every football injury into three phases, and each phase has its own information mechanism.

Phase one: the mechanical phase. This is the phase in which tissue is damaged and the body responds with inflammation. In this phase, information is usually accurate, because clinical signs are clear and the public has nothing to dispute. The player is in pain. The doctor diagnoses. The recovery time is estimated.

Phase two: the probabilistic phase. This is the phase in which information becomes ambiguous, and also the phase in which the desynchronization between parties becomes most visible. The player says "I feel better." The doctor says "we need more time." The coach says "we will wait until the weekend." In this phase, each party has a different incentive to interpret the same medical data in a different way.

Phase three: the social phase. This is the phase in which the injury becomes a media event. Fans argue. Pundits comment. The agent posts a statement on social media. In this phase, medical information is often buried under stories. And when medical information is buried under stories, the only thing left is the raw data — scans, dates, and actual recovery time.

I always try to work in phase one and phase two, and I step into phase three only when necessary. Because phase three is the phase in which medical truth is transformed into something else. And once it has been transformed, it is very hard to bring back.

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Contrarian IV: What Is Objection For?

There is one thing I want to make clear, because I know my image in the industry is that of a man who always objects.

I do not object because I want to object. I know there is a kind of journalist who does exactly that — always taking the opposite position to attract attention. I do not want to be that journalist.

I go against the grain only when a long-term data series genuinely supports it. In Lee Kang-in's case, I objected because I had tracked thousands of cortisone injections over years. In Lucas Oliveira's case, I objected because forty-seven old matches showed a clear pattern. In Son Heung-min's case, I objected because a clip filmed from the stands showed a thirty-eight-degree angle.

Without that data, I would say nothing. I would stay silent, write about tactics, and wait. That is something many people do not believe, but it is the truth. My data discipline, in the end, matters more than my need to be right.

Age sixty-eight taught me this: every player is healthy until the team doctor turns the next page. That is what I always remind myself. No player is a healthy entity. No player is an injured entity. There are only bodies at a specific point on a continuous damage spectrum, and the medical file is how we know where that point lies.

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Contrarian V: The Price of 187 Days

Let me speak about a number I used above: one hundred and eighty-seven days.

That is the total number of days Lee Kang-in lost to related injury issues in the season after the 2026 World Cup. I do not cite this number to accuse anyone. I cite it to pose a question: if we knew in advance that the probability was forty-one percent, was one hundred and eighty-seven days a reasonable price for three group-stage matches at the World Cup?

There is no correct answer. That is what I want to say. In sports medicine, as in football, every choice is a trade-off, and that trade-off cannot be judged by a single number. A player who chooses an injection to play at a World Cup is trading club career time for a national-team moment. A club that accepts that risk is trading asset value for a short-term chance at victory.

What I object to is not the trade-off. What I object to is a trade-off made without full information. Because a decision without full information is not a decision. It is a gamble, differing only in that the bettor is not told the odds.

A medical file is the only thing at the negotiating table that cannot be negotiated. And I think it should also be the only thing that everyone — players, coaches, clubs, and fans alike — gets to read before anyone picks up a pen.

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Core IX: What the File Never Says

I have spent a lifetime reading medical files. And I have learned that the most important thing a medical file never says is whether the human being is ready to accept the truth.

An MRI can tell you exactly the extent of a ligament's damage. It can tell you whether there is bone-marrow edema. It can tell you the thickness of the cartilage in a joint. But it cannot tell you whether that player has the courage to rest two more weeks. It cannot tell you whether that club has the patience to accept a short-term defeat. It cannot tell you whether that fan has the understanding not to demand the impossible.

And that is why, after more than fifty years in this work, I keep writing. Not because I believe data can solve everything. But because I believe data is the only honest starting point for any conversation about a human body under the pressure of a professional sport.

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Core X: A Probability Model for the Coming Season

When I look at the coming season, I do not see a table. I see a set of probability distributions. And although I offer no absolute prediction, I can speak about risk zones.

Low-risk zone: Clubs with a steady fixture calendar, sensible rotation, and a medical room empowered to decide. Players in this zone have a season-long risk of serious injury below ten percent.

Medium-risk zone: Clubs competing in multiple competitions, with congested calendars and thin squads. Serious-injury probability between fifteen and twenty-five percent.

High-risk zone: Clubs with congested calendars, thin squads, and a team doctor without veto power over selection. Players in this zone have a serious-injury probability above thirty percent.

I cannot tell you who will be injured next season. But I can tell you that in every season there are clubs whose probability is so high that you do not need to be an expert to see it. You only need to read the fixture list and count the players in the squad.

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End

I have no conclusion. I am sixty-eight, and one of the things I have learned is that conclusions are usually just hypotheses written in a confident voice.

What I have is a question, and I will leave it here for the reader.

If the probability of ACL rupture rises by twenty-three point four percent after a disruption exceeding ninety days, and if we have known that since 2026, then why do we still stage competitions with fixture calendars so congested that team doctors themselves must publicly warn about it? If we know the recurrence rate after cortisone injection is forty-one percent within six weeks, then why is that information not placed in front of every young player before he decides to sacrifice a season of his career for one match? And if we know that a medical file is the only thing that cannot be negotiated, then why is it the only thing we always negotiate first?

I have no answer. I have only data, a full notebook, and a belief that all of this — football, esports, the human body — deserves to be looked at with open eyes, rather than with a closed heart.

Son Heung-min's right ankle beat Germany before the ball rolled. But that is not the most important thing about that night. The most important thing is that after that night, nobody truly knew why. And for many years, that is what I have tried to change — not to take away the beauty of the match, but to make that beauty better understood.

Because a miracle that is misread is still a miracle. But it stops teaching us anything.