Last night I finished watching the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit.

The main character is a fictional female teenager from the ’60s. She’s a chess prodigy and climbs her way up the male-dominated chess world, eventually playing against chess grand masters. She goes on to beat several of them. Some gracefully shake her hand in admiration while others storm out of the room in embarrassment.

As the last episode concluded, I used my TV’s remote to switch from the Netflix app to ABC News, wanting an election result update. What I saw was a player realizing the inevitability of his loss, a player with no intention of gracefully resigning. Doing so would require civility and respect for the electorate, virtues he does not possess.

We’ll have to play this game to the end.