’60 SECONDS RUN’ (from our StoryScoring) takes its title and its lyrics from “If—”, Rudyard Kipling‘s 1910 poem from Rewards and Fairies. Framed as a father’s counsel to his son, it sets out a code for holding your nerve: keeping your head when others lose theirs, treating triumph and disaster as the twin impostors they are, and starting again from nothing without a word of complaint. The final test gives the song its name — whether you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.

A century on, the poem has escaped the era that made it. Voted Britain’s favorite poem in a BBC poll, it is inscribed above the players’ entrance to Center Court at Wimbledon, pinned to locker-room walls, read at graduations and funerals, and quoted by people who could not name another line of Kipling. Its grip is in the conditional: every promise it makes is contingent on what you do next.