I’m guessing it is attempt to allude to phrases like “the American century” and would have been clearer as “an American quarter of an hour.”
There’s an app for that.
It sounds like when people say there are “2 minutes” left in the game when, in reality, those two minutes take 15 to play.
I’m pretty sure that what is meant is not that the game will go on forever but rather that there is not a mention of time in the playing rules , for example , a baseball game is defined as nine innings * in which each team gets three outs. It’s not nine innings in which each team spends ten minutes at bat so that each inning lasts twenty minutes and a game nominally lasts three hours except, there is of course time that doesn’t count as playing time so the time elapsed from the start of the game to the end will of course be longer than three hours . Baseball doesn’t have the thing that
other sports have , where my husband tells me there’s five minutes left but it takes twenty minutes to play five minutes.
* There are exceptions for rain shortened games and extra innings in the event of a tie
Ah, right, that makes sense.
j
OK, clearly I was mistaken about cricket. Though I will say that the concept of a “time limit” for a game that’s measured in days is rather foreign to my mind.
In other words, a period of time during which an American is the focus of attention.