Pounding away at the drawing board

To be clear: I am pounding away at the drawing board.  The US soccer team, however, just has to go back to it.  Sigh.  My professional training has made me analytically skeptical and even suspicious of nationalisms of all forms, and yet I always find myself drawn into rooting for the US in international sporting events.  (And I don't even like sports that much, honestly!)  It didn't matter that I could see clearly that Ghana was outplaying us hugely and with tremendous grace, or that everyone knew that the US was mostly out of its league among the other teams in the Group of 16.  I just had to do it, and therefore I just had to feel like crap watching my country's team lose.

At least I can hang my hat on this: Ghana beat the US 2-1, which is an acceptably close game.  England, however, looked like a bunch of fucking idiots, losing to Germany 4-1.  It annoys me that the US seems unsure how to seal the deal whenever they get a striking opportunity, but that's better than talking a lot of shit about your opponent and then getting stomped.

Anyway.  After almost a week of avoiding it nervously, I tackled my article draft anew this morning, and hacked it down to 29 pages.  I feel like this gives me a reasonable amount of room for brief intro and concluding remarks, so I suddenly feel much better about it.  Now I can deal with another existential problem for academic writers: how do I say exactly the same thing in the introduction and conclusion without it appearing to be exactly the same thing?