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The final match is seen primarily through the eyes of a character who has been previously referenced, but never fully known until the end of the novel. Bullwinkel uses the character of Sam, a local journalist, to provide an outsider perspective to the world of girls’ boxing. Sam functions as a surrogate for the reader because he, like the reader, is approaching the world of the tournament for the first time. However, Bullwinkel drives a gap between the reader and Sam: While he comes in with limited knowledge of the boxers’ lives, Bullwinkel has used her characters’ interiority to give the reader the kind of telepathy that the boxers have with each other.

Sam’s perspective clarifies that the novel does not align with the conventional tournament format as a process of elimination. The novel both asks how a teenage girl must be in the world, and answers that the accumulation of the boxers’ shadows in the championship fight means that all the fighters’ stories are valid. Though most of the boxers have lost, they have succeeded in taking steps toward Self-Definition on One’s Own Terms.

The championship match itself is purposefully anticlimactic. Neither fighter experiences catharsis, heroic epiphany, or resolution of her character arc. Rose has her moment of joy after winning the tournament, but by then the reader knows that she will live the rest of her life in obscurity, struggling with her place in Dallas. The moment of Rose’s victory is truncated to underscore the tournament’s lack of importance—it is one of a series of forgettable Small Glories in the Grand Scheme of Life. The final two chapters, which function like an epilogue or coda, reinforce this by stressing that the Daughters of America Cup will not go on forever. On the other hand, the novel ends on the mystical description of athletic girlhood as a universal and endless state of being: “[G]irls are infinite backwards and forwards […] it is impossible to say where the first female athlete began and where they will end” (205). To depict the inevitability that girls will continue to become boxers, the novel leaves its realist mode and ends on a chapter of speculative fiction. Even when mankind has colonized other planets, girls’ motivations will broadly resemble those of the fighters seen in the present day. The novel imagines a futuristic scenario where two girls will fight over misheard hand-clapping game lyrics while playing on a planet that has six moons. Their fight, as always, will be an attempt to assert dominance, refusing the other’s insistence on how they must play the game.

The tournament’s lack of importance as a historical event does not diminish its importance in the lives of the boxers. The novel argues that every girl has the potential to become a boxer, activating that potential as a reaction to the circumstances of their lives. As tournament champion, Rose no longer has to see herself as someone who was bullied for her height and quiet personality. Rather, she is a winner because of the alchemy of skill and body. As Sam writes, Rose no longer has to dream of winning because she has achieved it. In turn, Rachel bears no ill feelings toward Rose. In the future, she will hold on to the news clipping as though she had won herself. Her good nature comes from sharing in the glory of fighting a worthy champion. In this way, the champion match represents the positive impact of Small Glories in the Grand Scheme of Life on both contenders.