A close game can be lost without every difficult decision having been wrong.

Losing narrowly invites a reconstruction in which every hard choice is suddenly visible as an error. Decisions made with partial information get marked against a result nobody had at the time, which makes them all look reckless in hindsight. Some calls were genuinely wrong and worth learning from, and others were sound and simply did not land. Telling those apart is the actual work, and the scoreline cannot do it for you.

When you review something that went badly, ask what was known at that moment rather than what is known now. Keep the decisions you would make again, and say so out loud.