Big Buddy sessions (pp. 116–117)
until finally one P.M. there’s a little knock on his door and it’s deLint, here for a little chat about your progress here at E.T.A.
Context
The Academy's dread runs through a paternal figure too, but the punitive kind. The quiet knock and the "little chat about your progress" is E.T.A.'s image of judgment — deLint as the disappointed-father-with-the-clipboard whose soft knock ends careers, invoked twice in the plateau-types catechism as the fate of every boy who despairs or overworks or grows complacent. The whole Big Buddy apparatus is surrogate-paternal — older players mentoring younger, Wayne so sought-after you enter a lottery for him — but deLint is its stern pole: the ersatz father you don't want to hear at the door.