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Manchester City has five players who have scored exactly one goal this Premier League season: Matheus Nunes, Phil Foden, Rayan Cherki, Tijjani Reijnders, and Nico O'Reilly. That makes for a five-way tie for third-most goals for the club, behind Burnley's Maxime Estève, whose two own goals on Sep. 27 rank second on the Manchester City Goal Sources Rankings. In first place? That would be Erling Haaland, whose 13 goals are far and away not just the most on Manchester City, but more than double the next highest mark in the Premier League (Brentford's Igor Thiago, Brighton's Danny Welbeck, Bournemouth's Antoine Semenyo, and Crystal Palace's Jean-Philippe Mateta are all tied for second with six goals each). Haaland has been pretty much the entire Manchester City attack, as he demonstrated again with a 16-minute brace on Sunday against Bournemouth in City's 3-1 win, which helped the club keep within range of high-flying Arsenal at the top of the league.

Imagine you muster up the courage to finally do that thing you've been meaning to do. It's hard enough to overcome your own momentum to get out of the house, but once you've made the leap you might be confronted by the reality of a thousand unspoken rules and norms you never considered. One of the most stressful parts of trying anything new is the unspoken world of context and rules that people seem to just know. When Josh Gondelman told me he wanted to play pickup basketball for his episode, I was fixated on the unspoken norms that underpin the idea. I have never played in a pickup basketball game, and I don't really have any desire to start now. But how the hell does someone learn what "first to 11 by ones and twos, call your fouls" means?

There is only one possible silver lining to facing down a 31-point deficit in the fourth quarter of a football game, and that is the opportunity to get your young, recently injured franchise quarterback off the field before anything bad can happen to him. Washington Commanders head coach Dan Quinn failed to understand this during Sunday night's 38-14 loss to the Seahawks, and now another football season in Washington, D.C. has died in the dirt. With 12:30 left in the game, Quinn kept starting quarterback Jayden Daniels in and watched him drive the Commanders down the field in pursuit of a meaningless consolation score. On the 10th play of the drive, Daniels faked a handoff at the Seahawks' 2-yard line and took off for the end zone. He was sacked while sprinting to his right, and reportedly dislocated his elbow as he hit the ground. The replay angle of the injury is fairly gruesome, so view it at your own risk.

This puzzle was constructed by Hannah Binney, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hannah is a crossword constructor living in Cambridge, Mass. She began constructing in 2020, and she has had puzzles appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Universal, AVCX, and Puzzmo. When not constructing crosswords, Hannah is a particle physicist.  She has an orange cat named Julius. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. Note that we're pausing open submissions until Dec. 1.

Baseball makes you feel bad. I don't mean that in a literate sense ripping off Bart Giamatti's lede, the sense of dreading a sullen winter spent longing for the sensory pleasures of the game. I mean that baseball at its best, when the beats are on rhythm and when the high notes are hit, can be downright torture to watch. At the most stressful moments, the time between pitches allows you a regular moment to be alone with your agony—to bite fingernails or breathe shallowly or pace your living room. Then the pitch is delivered, and there's just enough time to hope or fear, but, likely as not, a ball is fouled off and you get to do it all again. And again and again and again. Sometimes, several unexpected bonus innings of it. Heart disease as a hobby. Whoever invented baseball had a cruel streak. Whoever enjoys it has a touch of masochism. If your team wins, the bad memories dissipate. This is a favor from the brain, a thank-you for the dopamine. Dodgers fans won't long be able to truly recall how they felt in the interstices of Game 7. They'll remember the triumphs big and small that broke the stretches of torment, and the elation that followed, but the rest of it will fade. Most teams, however, don't get to win—not the big one, anyway. Most fans get to sit with their what-ifs for the winter and, if they're unlucky enough to have a team good enough to raise their hopes and successful enough to reach October where true heartbreak grows, they'll sit with it for the rest of their lives. Few fans have it worse here than Blue Jays fans.

You can take your World Series and push it up your tush. The NFL delivers excitement similar to that of the high-stakes, edge-of-your-seat extra-inning baseball the Blue Jays and Dodgers gave us last week. To see the heroics of Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto or even Miguel Rojas, you have to stay up late or risk missing out something incredible (with Ray Ratto deservedly putting salt on your wound). But to see the heroics of Caleb Williams or Joe Flacco, you just need to have a free Sunday afternoon. The Bears and Bengals played a funny, fascinating, fantastic game. Next up: Dinner. Deep dish pizza, maybe. Now let me yell at you: What were you possibly doing that you didn’t watch a Week 9 football game between two crap teams on a Sunday afternoon? It is no excuse that the game aired mostly in states that border the Great Lakes. The Bears' 47-42 win over the Bengals was tremendous.

We were worried for a few moments that the athletic directors/state governors/rich swine who run college football would forget about their seven-week streak of coach firings, but that is a personal failure of faith in the power of administrative bloodlust. They know what must be done, and they never hesitate to do it. So hello and goodbye to Hugh Freeze, who just got the cardboard box at Auburn after a humiliating (well, for Auburners) 10-3 loss to Kentucky on Saturday. Freeze had the mark of the goat upon him almost from the moment he was hired at Auburn, based on the NCAA's skepticism stemming from his cavalier view of rules at Ole Miss, and losses in his three-year tenure to powers like pre-NIL Vanderbilt, Cal, Oklahoma and New Mexico State convinced whoever makes decisions at Auburn to make the call on Freeze. Interestingly, the interim coach is D.J. Durkin, the former Maryland coach who was fired in the wake of a school investigation following the death of offensive lineman Jordan McNair due to heatstroke following an offseason workout. "Toxic environment" was the key sentence here, so whatever the Auburn fanbase may think, they are hardly out of the frying pan, let alone the fire.

The Toronto Blue Jays sent 57 batsmen to the plate in the 25 hours between Yoshinobu Yamamoto's last pitch of Game 6 of the World Series and his first pitch of Game 7, so it isn't like they didn't have plenty of chances to avert the doom that was ultimately theirs. Indeed, the last World Series like this one was actually the cafeteria scene in Blazing Saddles, and that was 51 years ago. Too many deeds from too many people, too many defining achievements and agonizing near-misses, too much to absorb and too many details into which you could lose yourselves. Somehow, though, the longest and least-hinged World Series since the Black Sox invented gambling found its equilibrium in the last place a rational baseball knower would have expected to look, and at the last possible moment—with Yamamoto providing the one bit of comprehensible order this ziggurat of chaos could permit.

This thoroughly excellent World Series will go seven games because it needs to go seven games. Not "needs to" in the wishful sense employed by my colleague Ray Ratto, the inveterate maximum sports wanter—who, by the grace of the blog gods will be in this chair to write the gamer—but needs to because six games has settled nothing. The Dodgers and Blue Jays bring out the best in each other, or barring that the most histrionic. They are well-matched teams, each with clear strengths and flaws, to be in turn maximized or minimized or exploited. Even in a low-scoring Game 6 which saw the Dodgers improbably protect a 3-1 lead in a wild ninth inning, 25 outs weren't enough to settle anything. Outs 26 and 27, which did, came in the blink of an eye and the beat of a heart, or, anyway, would have if one's rooting interests allowed for either. With the tying runs in scoring position and one out, Andres Gimenez made solid inside-out contact on a pitch from Tyler Glasnow, the presumed Game 7 starter, but in to try to preserve a victory that felt like it was slipping away. Addison Barger at second was off on contact; he said he didn't realize Gimenez got quite so much of the barrel on it, and that he thought it was going to bloop in just over the shortstop, and that he knew he needed to at least advance to third so he might score on a sac fly. But the ball hung up, and Barger roamed a bit too far, and emotions were rent and reversed in an instant.

We followed the Owl Whisperer around the gun battery toward a grove of pitch pines, where he had seen the saw-whet owl. Then I heard someone ask behind me, “Where are they going?” I turned around and saw a couple I had met earlier. My heart sank. I had learned that they were getting into birding and that we lived in the same neighborhood. I wanted to tell them. I really did. I knew how exciting this could be for them. But there was an owl code in New York.