Malamud on expectations

"...She stroked his brow slowly with her fingers.

'What happened fifteen years ago, Roy?'

Roy felt like crying, yet he told her -- the first one he ever had. 'I was just a kid and I got shot by this batty dame on the night before my tryout, and after that I just couldn't get started again. I lost my confidence and everything I did flopped.'

He said this was the shame of his life, that his fate, somehow, had always been the same (on the train going nowhere) -- defeat in sight of his goal."

-- from "The Natural" (1952) by Bernard Malamud