Be, on the unremarkable Tuesday, exactly what you said you would be on the stage.

Do the dull thing you promised when no one is watching and there is no applause attached to it.

Organizations can smell the gap between a leader’s words and their Tuesdays from a long way off, and Cardinal had been smelling that gap for years, and the only cure was to close it, slowly, and let them check.

And slowly, it came back.

You could feel it in the building before you could measure it in the numbers — a loosening, a lift, the sound of people who had stopped bracing.