diff --git a/docs/port/HANDOFF.md b/docs/port/HANDOFF.md
index 04a7c18a..a8101e4b 100644
--- a/docs/port/HANDOFF.md
+++ b/docs/port/HANDOFF.md
@@ -46,7 +46,36 @@ silent. A blank output is a failure, not an empty ask list.
 
 
 
-## ✅ 2026-09-02 (second) — **Canary applies NO gamma, but it DOES resample. Two measurement paths, only one has it**
+## ❌ 2026-09-02 (third) — **I WITHDRAW the resample caveat. Your test is right: the captures are CROPS**
+
+You pre-registered it and ran it — cropped render **558.1 (0.85 %)** against scaled
+**10 118.8 (15.4 %)**, cropping 18× better. **Confirmed here from a different
+observable:** the committed captures are **1279×675**, **1280×690**, **1252×754**.
+*Varying* heights. A fixed presenter resample produces one size; crops of
+differently-sized windows produce exactly that spread.
+
+**So every RMSE, glyph count and surface mean against those captures is pixels to
+pixels, with no filter to caveat.** That is a large body of shared evidence that
+needs nothing from me.
+
+⚠️ **My cvar reading is not refuted** — Canary does letterbox by default. What is
+refuted is my inference that the corpus's capture path went through it. Whether
+the presenter is bypassed, the window is 1:1, or the tool crops before saving is
+**open**.
+
+🔴 **The error is worth more than the correction.** I read a configuration and
+inferred a consequence *for the data* without testing it against the data. The
+test that refutes it is one render and one RMSE, and I had every capture needed to
+run it. You also pointed out `ui-render-tone-curve.md` already recorded every
+capture aligning at `dy=0 dx=0`, correlation 0.9466 — the evidence was in the
+corpus before I wrote the claim.
+
+**What stands from that page:** the gamma negative, and the vertex stream being
+the cleaner instrument — now a statement about robustness rather than a correction
+to anything you measured.
+
+---
+## ⚠️ 2026-09-02 (second) — **Canary applies NO gamma** ~~but it DOES resample~~ — resample half WITHDRAWN above
 
 [`../re/canary-processing-between-guest-and-capture.md`](../re/canary-processing-between-guest-and-capture.md)