Stice stuck to the window: Hal misdiagnoses the crisis as plateaux-nerves
You feel yourself starting to climb plateaux, starting to play the way you came here hoping one day to play, and part of you doesn’t believe it, it feels wrong. I went through this. [...] Not that. None of that.
Context
Hal reaches for the pedagogy to explain Stice's distress, and reaches wrong. He offers the plateaux-diagnosis — "you feel yourself starting to climb plateaux, starting to play the way you came here hoping one day to play, and part of you doesn't believe it" — projecting his own developmental crisis (cf. 122's choked match, 130's fear-arrival) onto Stice. Stice cuts it off: "Not that. None of that." The institution's whole vocabulary for a young player's trouble — plateaux, belief, pre-tournament nerves — turns out to have no word for what's actually happening to Stice's body and mind, and Hal can only misread it from his own experience.