The Lead We Couldn’t Hold

my deaths (10)
my kills (6)
first blood (not me)
Roshan (Radiant)
fort falls

0:00–19:57

A lead, briefly

For the first twenty minutes, this looked like our game.

We took three of Radiant’s tier-one towers by 19:57 against just one of ours lost. My own early game was rougher — four deaths before the twenty-minute mark, to four different heroes (Phantom Lancer, Silencer, Bristleback, Techies), none of them a pattern yet, just a support catching stray hits in a chaotic laning phase. I got one back on Techies at 14:06.

21:40–23:07

Eighty-six seconds

The best stretch of my game, by a wide margin.

Four kills in under a minute and a half: Bristleback at 21:40, Doom and Phantom Lancer forty seconds apart around 22:44, then Bristleback again at 23:07. Phoenix’s kit rewards exactly this — a fight that goes long enough for Sun Ray to keep tracking a target is a fight Phoenix wins. For those ninety seconds, it did.

34:18–51:30

The reversal

Everything after the twenty-minute mark belonged to Radiant. Starting at 36:53 they began taking down what we’d built and didn’t stop: by 51:30 we’d lost both tier-two and tier-three towers on two lanes, both sets of barracks on bot and mid, and our tier-one top. Four of my ten deaths landed inside this exact window — three of them to Bristleback.

Roshan went to Radiant at 55:00 (Phantom Lancer), right in the middle of the worst of it. By that point the map had fully flipped from where it stood at the twenty-minute mark.

57:37–62:31

One answer, not enough

We had one real counter-push left: four towers, a mid barracks pair, and a filler creep all fell to us between 57:37 and 58:28. I died to Techies in the middle of it, at 58:13, my last death of the game. It wasn’t enough ground to make up. Radiant finished the job methodically from 60:03 onward, and the fort came down at 62:31.

My final line

135,364 hero damage is the second-highest figure in the entire match, behind only Skywrath Mage’s 201,152 — and Skywrath had the benefit of never missing a fight (75.8% participation, the highest on either team). Between the two of us and a 22-kill AntiMage, Dire had three genuinely excellent individual games and still lost. Sometimes the box score isn’t the story; the twelve minutes between 36:53 and 49:02 were.

Three good scorelines don’t beat one team that wins every fight for fifteen straight minutes.

Full scoreboard

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Reconstructed from the match replay with dotabuff/manta · combat log + entity snapshot analysis. Match 8906591403 · 10 players · 64:56 · Radiant victory.