Four hours.

It is such an enormous span of time for a nine-year-old to hold a weight like that — an eternity, at that age, an entire small lifetime of endurance.

And what strikes me most, when I think about those four hours, is not the physical toll of them, terrible as that was.

It is the moral shape of them.

Because for most of those four hours, my daughter was not primarily fighting her tired arms.

She was fighting a lesson.