the post-Stice debrief: the afternoon he couldn't feel the ball on his stick
That afternoon he’d had zilch in the way of a kinesthetic sense: he couldn’t feel the ball on his stick. [...] For the last year his arm’s been an extension of his mind and the stick an extension of the arm, acutely sensitive.
Context
Here's what "never quite occurred" felt like from inside the body. Against Stice, Hal "had zilch in the way of a kinesthetic sense: he couldn't feel the ball on his stick" — the sensory circuit that normally makes "his arm... an extension of his mind and the stick an extension of the arm" simply cut out. The body-as-machine doctrine's whole promise is this continuous feedback loop, mind to arm to string to ball; when it drops, the machine is still moving but no longer feeling, and the player becomes a spectator of his own strokes. The nonoccurrence deLint measured from the stands was, in the flesh, a lost sense of touch.