Sunday brought one of those rare mornings when hope felt real for the Tennessee Titans, a franchise that had nearly forgotten the simple joy of winning two games in a row. They hadn’t experienced a winning streak since November 2022, which in NFL years might as well be a lifetime. There they were, though, at home, facing a Cleveland Browns team that had struggled all season to push the ball downfield and ranked dead last in the league in rushing offense. The conditions were perfect, almost too perfect. The Titans burst out of the gate like a team possessed, jumping…

On a storm-wracked Saturday night in late October, a small, insistent signal went out from an oil tanker in the North Atlantic, and the heavy machinery of maritime emergency response began to turn. The vessel, named the Myra, was inside the Irish Exclusive Economic Zone, a phrase that sounds like a legal technicality but simply means a nation has special rights and responsibilities over a vast stretch of ocean. The weather was brutal. Huge rolling seas, described by people familiar with the situation as severe, were sweeping across the region, and the Myra had sent a distress alert. Within minutes,…