The best tennis match I ever played consisted of only one marathon set. That set ended inconclusively with each of us having won fifteen games—a 15-15 tie—when we had to relinquish the court. My opponent and I had scrambled around swatting shots at each other for nearly two hours to produce those thirty games. Along the way, each of us was repeatedly just one point from victory. Time and again, one of us held a “set point” where, by winning just the very next point, he’d h

A few years back, Patti and our daughter Ali and I were in a serious pickle. Sailing from Connecticut to Maine in a newly acquired sailboat, the engine seized up while we were coping with fierce winds and massive waves at the entrance to the Cape Cod Canal. So we called the marina in Mattapoisett for a tow boat to pull us back in for repairs. But the 40MPH winds had created troubled seas everywhere, and the tow boat refused to come to us. Sail back into the anchorage in t