the grief-therapy call: the calibrated body won't change a thing
once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail. [...] but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun. Your heart’s in your throat every time you change sides of the court.
Context
The Zone's superstition rendered as the athlete's terror of his own good fortune: when the calibration descends "you don't want to change even the smallest detail" — not the grip, the stick, the side of the court, the angle to the sun. The player can't isolate which "concordance of factors and variables" produced the state, so he freezes every variable, and the mandatory changeover of ends becomes an ordeal, heart in the throat. Flow is a gift the body can't reverse-engineer, so it guards the whole ritual around it.