What cannot be repaired is everything that the delay cost — the thirty years that passed while Thorpe was alive and his titles were gone, the twenty years after his death before the AAU restored his amateur status, the further decade before the IOC granted partial recognition, the forty more years before full recognition was achieved.

The hundred and nine years between the disqualification and the correction were not an administrative abstraction.

They were the years of a man’s life, and his children’s lives, and his grandchildren’s lives, lived under the shadow of a decision that the institution itself had not made correctly.

The original gold medals are gone — stolen from museum collections decades ago and never recovered.

The replica medals presented to Thorpe’s family in 1983 exist.