For fifty-one minutes at a craps table in Reno he could not lose. Strangers put money behind his line and touched his shoulder for luck and he let them, because it felt correct, because in that specific hour he was a man the universe had singled out. He was up $19,000 at 2:40 in the morning. Someone bought him a drink he never touched.

Leaving did not occur to him, because leaving would have meant it was over, and it was not over, it was the best he had ever felt about himself. He gave it all back by four and eleven thousand more by six. For years afterward he described that hour to anyone who would sit still for it — always the fifty-one minutes, never the four hours after.