On January 1st, 1962, the Beatles drove 10 hours through snow to a Decca studio in West Hampstead, borrowed the company's amplifiers, and played 15 songs in an hour with Pete Best on drums. Five weeks later, on February 6th, Brian Epstein sat down to lunch at Decca's head office on the Thames and heard the answer. Dick Rowe, the man who chose what Decca recorded, had picked a group from Dagenham instead, 12 miles from the studio rather than 200.

Signing would have cost Decca almost nothing. Rowe's own assistant, Mike Smith, wanted both groups and was told he could have one. Epstein had promised Decca's sales department that his family's shops would buy 3,000 copies of any single the group made, which in 1962 was enough to cover the record before it existed. Rowe said years later that the number would have forced him to sign them. Nobody on the sales floor carried it upstairs, and Epstein left with 2 reels of tape in his briefcase.

What if somebody had said the number out loud?

This week we hit CTRL+Z on the lunch where Decca said no, and follow the ripple to today: a hired drummer at the kit while Pete Best watches through the control room glass, Ringo Starr on a boat to Hamburg for £20 a week, a producer who quits the biggest band in the world over a van driver's wages, an orchestra on a riser in West Hampstead in 1967, and a tour bus outside a red brick building that isn't Abbey Road. The tapes end up in the same company's vault either way, because on the one afternoon it counted, a sales manager finished his coffee and repeated a figure.

On June 8th, 1528, Pope Clement VII signed a decretal commission — a document giving two cardinals the power to end Henry VIII's marriage on English soil, with no appeal to anyone — and then ordered it shown to the king once and burned. Fourteen months later, on July 23rd, 1529, one of those cardinals stood up in a converted monastery hall at Blackfriars and adjourned the court for the harvest. It never reconvened.

Signing would have cost Clement almost nothing on paper. Popes had been dissolving royal marriages for 400 years, and Alexander VI granted Louis XII of France one in 1498 on a case so thin the queen produced witnesses to her husband's boasting. Clement himself offered to bless a wedding between Henry's daughter and Henry's illegitimate son to make the problem go away. What stopped him was a Spanish army that had sacked Rome in 1527 and held him in a fortress for 6 months, commanded by the queen's own nephew.

What if he'd let that first document stand?

This week we hit CTRL+Z on the annulment Rome refused, and follow the ripple to today: a prince born at Greenwich in 1531, an Englishman in white robes in Rome, a letter from Edinburgh that gets a polite refusal, and a bell tower in Yorkshire with the roof still on it. Nobody ever chisels the abbeys down, because on the one afternoon it counted, a frightened man in Orvieto signed his name.

On April 28th, 1967, Muhammad Ali stood in a line of 46 men on the third floor of a Houston induction center while Lieutenant Steven Dunkley read the rule: take one step forward when your name is called, and the step itself puts you in the Army. The heavyweight champion of the world had spent the morning taking the physical and turning down a ham sandwich. Officers called his name 3 times, warned him that refusing meant a felony, 5 years, and $10,000, and got a written statement instead.

The step would have cost him almost nothing. The government had offered his lawyers "all kinds of deals," no combat and no rifle, just boxing exhibitions for the troops, the same arrangement Joe Louis had in World War II. Sugar Ray Robinson begged him to take it. Elijah Muhammad forbade it, and the last man who defied the Nation of Islam was Malcolm X. Ali's feet never moved.

What if they had?

This week we hit CTRL+Z on the step he refused, and follow the ripple to today: a quiet Sunday in Cleveland, a nickname that stays on a Harlem playground, a swimmer lighting the cauldron in Atlanta, and a roll call at the 2016 ESPYs that runs 1 name short. Nobody ever marches behind Muhammad Ali, because on the one afternoon it counted, Cassius Clay stepped forward.