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Today’s Connections: Sports Edition features a category all about my favorite football team. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: We’ll be right back…

Green group hint: Run for the roses.

Blue group hint: Skol!

Purple group hint: 

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Break in the action.

Green group: Bets in horse racing.

Blue group: QBs drafted by Vikings in first round.

Purple group: Race ____.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is break in the action. The four answers are intermission, pause, suspension and timeout.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is bets in horse racing. The four answers are exacta, place, show and win.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is QBs drafted by Vikings in first round. The four answers are Bridgewater, Culpepper, McCarthy and Ponder.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is race ____. The four answers are bib, car, course and walking.

For years, Google has released an A series line of Pixel phones that deliver a lot of features for less money than their more expensive counterparts, and 2026 is no exception. The company’s newly announced Pixel 10A is a capable addition to the Pixel 10 lineup and it starts at only $499 (the base Pixel 10, on the other hand, starts at $799). 

There are tradeoffs made in the 10A to hit its lower price, but compared to its predecessors, the 10A is quite the upgrade. Well, sort of. While the 10A is an improvement over the Pixel 7A and 8A, it’s not too different from the Pixel 9A. 

We’d say 98% of the 10A and its features are the same as the 9A, including the use of Google’s Tensor G4 chip. However the Pixel 10A does include some new hardware improvements, including faster wired charging and Satellite SOS.

Here’s how the Pixel 10A compares with the 9A, the 8A and the 7A. 

Pixel 9A vs 10 series: Display and design

The Pixel 10A looks and feels similar to the Pixel 9A. It has the same measurements, at 6.1 by 2.9 by 0.4 inches. It also has the same display: 6.3-inch OLED with a 60 to 120Hz variable refresh rate. The 8A and the 7A both have slightly smaller 6.1-inch OLED screens, and the 7A’s display variable refresh rate caps out at 90Hz. 

One of the upgrades that the 10A has over the rest of the lineup is that the display glass is Corning Gorilla Glass 7i, which offers better drop and scratch performance over its predecessors. The 9A, 8A and 7A all use Gorilla Glass 3. The 10A is also the brightest of the lot with 3,000 nits of peak brightness. The 9A tops out at 2,700 nits, the 8A at 1,500 nits and the 7A at just 1,000 nits. 

The 10A has much better contrast as well, with a 2,000,000:1 ratio compared to the 9A’s 1,000,000:1 ratio. This should mean that the display will look better with brighter whites and darker black. Both the 8A and 7A have the same contrast ratio as the 9A. 

Google’s Pixel 10A Looks Stylish for a Low-Cost Flagship Phone

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Pixel 9A vs 10 series: Battery

Both the Pixel 10A and the 9A ship with a 5,100-mAh battery, which has a larger capacity than the 8A’s 4,492-mAh and the 7A’s 4,385-mAh battery. However, in our tests, we found that the Pixel 9A’s 5,100-mAh battery lasted about the same as the 8A, due in part to the 9A’s bigger, brighter screen and its more powerful processor. It remains to be seen if the 10A will have the same fate. 

The 10A does have faster 30W wired charging when using a 45W adapter compared to the 23W speed on the 9A. (Both the 8A and 7A have 18W fast charging.) It also supports wireless charging up to 10W (Qi-certified) while the 9A, 8A and 7A have 7.5W wireless charging. 

Pixel 9A vs 10 series: Performance and connectivity

The Pixel 10A and 9A are both powered by Google’s Tensor G4 chip, so there aren’t a lot of changes there. The 8A is powered by Google’s Tensor G3 chip while the 7A uses the Tensor G2. 

As for connectivity, however, the 10A does have a couple of upgrades that the 9A lacks. The Pixel 10A has Satellite SOS, which the 9A doesn’t have. This service lets 10A users send SMS messages to emergency services. The 10A also has Bluetooth 6, while the 9A only has 5.3. Bluetooth 6 promises to reduce latency while also being more power-efficient. 

Check out the below chart to further compare the differences between the Pixel 10A, 9A, 8A and 7A.

Everyone who loves mysteries secretly hopes that one day life will drop an intriguing puzzle into their lap for them to solve. Maybe not an Agatha Christie-type crime, but something that will send them on a real-world chase to connect the dots and land at a satisfying conclusion.

That’s exactly what happened to Katie Elkin, a retired teacher with a penchant for mysteries. «I’m 84 and I have lived a full, wonderful life,» she tells me over a video call from her home in Prescott, Arizona.

Until now, Elkin’s mysteries have largely been genealogy-based. She recounts an extraordinary story about making friends with a woman from California and discovering that their grandfathers had trained together in the Army and then shipped out to France in World War I on the same day. «That’s my whole life,» she says. «It’s coincidences.»

On this Friday in February, we’re talking about another coincidence in Elkin’s life — one of finding a phone, lost for a decade in the desert, and Elkin’s attempt to reunite it with its owner. 

Our phones are immensely personal items, serving both as memory banks that store our most precious data and as portals that connect us with every important person in our lives. These days, if we lose them, tracking technology means there’s every chance we could be quickly reunited with them, but that hasn’t always been the case. 

Those disappearances can be high-stress moments for anyone — just ask Apple about the unreleased iPhones it lost back in 2010 and 2011, which, coincidentally, were around the same time it introduced the Find My iPhone feature. But even today, recovering a lost phone means relying to an extent on the goodwill and honesty of the person who found it. Many people will choose to do the right thing in this scenario, and some — like Elkin — will go above and beyond to help out a stranger.

On a sunny day just before Thanksgiving, Elkin and her husband drove about 10 minutes west of the city to spend some time outdoors. Prescott is surrounded by national parks and ponderosa pine forest, but on this day, Elkin was headed to the desert — not for a hike, she says, but an «amble.»

Rather than taking the well-marked trail popular with hikers and ATVs, Elkin instead split off onto a lesser-known path «obliterated by the grasses and the weeds.»

It was Elkin’s dad who taught her that if she wanted to spot something, she should look for it — sage advice that’s served her well over the years. «He was always finding change,» she says. «And I can do that too. I always find animals. If we’re driving, I can see them in the woods … I’m always looking for something.»

Looking for a vague something can turn up the oddest of things, and on that particular day, the something Elkin found was a dusty, beaten 2012 Samsung Gusto 2 lying on its side, clamshell open in the scrub.

Elkin picked up the phone, thinking she would give it to a neighbor boy who liked to take electronics apart. But when she got it home, she was struck by another idea — what if she could get the phone to turn on? 

Like many of us with a drawer full of mystery cables, Elkin has kept all the cords and wires that have come with the electronics she’s purchased over the years. She dug through her stash and found a charger that fit the Gusto (she still has no idea what it was used for previously).

When CNET reviewed the Gusto 2 — a simple flip phone that came out the same year as the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S3 — we said: «the construction seems strong enough to withstand multiple drops and endless opening and closing.» Our instincts about its potential resilience were, it turns out, correct.

«I couldn’t believe it when it came up charging,» Elkin says. It took a little while, but when the phone turned on, she was ecstatic. «I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I wonder who this phone belongs to?’ And so that was when the mystery began.»

The quest for answers

Elkin went into the text messages and started to piece together the Gusto owner’s life, clue by clue. The owner worked in a cafe, she seemed to have family connections in Chicago, she was a renter and a keen hiker. Her name was Maddie.

The other thing Elkin noticed was that the last message was marked Saturday, May 16. It was the only evidence she had to indicate when exactly the phone might have been lost. She went to the internet and looked up which years May 16 had fallen on a Saturday. Two possible answers cropped up — 2020 and 2015.

Elkin’s internet research didn’t stop there. She took one of the commonly texted numbers in the phone and did a reverse lookup. «And bingo! I found a woman’s name that had that phone number,» she says. But when she called the number, it was disconnected.

«I said to myself, who would know where she is?» says Elkin. «Her dad would know.» She found a number listed under «daddio,» performed another reverse lookup and found the name of a man living in Chicago. «I was so excited because I was getting close,» she says.

On Dec. 30, Elkin’s birthday, she called the number, but no one picked up. She had to leave a message. «I was really disappointed, because I wanted to talk to somebody,» she says.

Ten minutes later, her phone rang, but when she picked up, it wasn’t a man on the other end of the line. «It was Maddie, the owner of the phone,» she says. «She had come to Chicago to visit her dad for the holidays.»

Elkin and Maddie talked for around 10 minutes. «She was amazed,» says Elkin. «We were both amazed.» Maddie didn’t want her phone back, but it turns out she had lost it in 2015 after hiking in the exact spot that Elkin had found it. 

The little phone that could

For a decade, the little Gusto had been lying out in the desert. Unlike some parts of Arizona, Prescott has four seasons, with all the minus temperatures, scorching heat, snowfall and summer storms that come with them. The Gusto weathered every storm, and battered and bruised as it was, it still came back to life.

We have little expectation these days that our phones will last us a long time, and we rarely get all the life out of our devices that they’re capable of offering us. Rather than seeking to get them repaired, once they fail us in one respect, we tend to seek out replacements. Most Americans hang onto their phones for an average of 2.5 years, according to a Reviews.org survey.

It turns out, though, that some phones are built to last, and the Gusto was one of them. After Elkin had spoken with Maddie, she reached out to Samsung to let them know her story. «I said to myself, ‘Does Samsung require some kudos for having a product that lasted that long?'»

Any tech company would. My own first phone, a 2002 Sagem MW 3020, gave up the ghost simply by being exposed to the concept of water while wrapped up inside a backpack on a rainy day. In spite of the best efforts of phone-makers to increase display resiliency, many people are still walking around out there with cracked screens.

For as long as we’ve had mobile phones, they’ve been vulnerable pieces of kit. But whatever secret sauce Samsung put inside the 2012 Gusto 2 shows that it was more robust than most — even though it was lying open with its main screen exposed when Elkin found it.

At the time we reviewed the Gusto 2, we gave it a score of 7 out of 10, with points knocked off for its subpar screen resolution and a smaller-than-usual headphone jack. It’s too late for us to go back and revise that score in light of what we know about how robust the phone is 14 years later, but it’s entirely possible that the «problems» we highlighted actually played into the Gusto’s long-term survival.

Elkin still doesn’t know what she’s going to do with Maddie’s Gusto, although a friend has suggested that Samsung clad it in gold and put it on a pole at headquarters. Samsung is clearly proud of the phone’s durability, having put me in touch with Elkin, but is also undecided about how to celebrate the life the Gusto 2 has lived. In spite of Elkin’s love for mysteries and my suggestion that the FBI recruit her, she isn’t about to start a detective agency to reunite other people with their lost possessions. «It’s just a hobby,» she laughs.

That’s a shame. As someone who’s lost more than one phone over the years, I would dearly love to be reunited with my missing technology, and I’m sure there’s a market for Elkin’s skills. Not every phone is as resilient as the Gusto. Most devices that have taken such a battering would likely refuse to even turn on. 

Perhaps there’s a longevity challenge for all phone-makers. I can’t promise CNET would be able to replicate this scenario in our reviews testing process, but in an age of disposable tech, it would be lovely to give extra points for truly hard-earned durability.