"Go with the flow" (1971); "Hit the ball and run like hell" (1965)

[Laurence Horn]

I wonder whether we can celebrate the birth of a new sports cliché,
N. Y. Jets' coach Herman Edwards' carefully enunciated "You play.  To
win.  The game."  This was uttered last year, with the exaggerated
intonation contour represented above, during the course of a
post-game press conference, and since then it's been repeated (with
approximations of the same intonation contour) either verbatim or
with variations on the same theme (but retaining the contour).  Since
then, Herm Edwards has evidently written one of those "leadership
secrets" books using the line (without my internal punctuation) as
its title. Perhaps 30 years from now they'll be trying to track down
the origin of the cliché.   (None of this should be taken to
guarantee that Edwards invented the line or its delivery; for all I
know his high school football coach, or third-grade marbles
instructor, used to say that to young Herm.)

Larry