Finally, she raised her hand towards the ceiling of the hall.
It was the usual gesture for the judges.
But this time Nadine Apetz didn't want to put her last conviction into it, she just didn't have it.
After the first and probably last Olympic duel of a memorable career, it was clear to her that it would be a close decision.
It then became the tightest that is possible in Olympic boxing.
Three of the international jurors had their Indian opponent Lovlina Borgohain in front, two the double aspirant from Cologne: candidate for a featherweight medal, originally, as well as for an academic degree in neuroscience, which is already overdue.
In the end a question of style
It was just a comparison on an equal footing that must be unfair in any case.
What the 35-year-old managed from the middle of the ring in poisonous but always controlled attacks, she usually got back as a counterattack from her opponent, who was superior in range.
And where the former showed a lot of courageous activity, the latter knew how to convince with greater composure and technical finesse.
Then in the end it is a question of style as to which one likes better.
So two officials of the Indian and one official of the German gave all three rounds.
In the extreme case, one can find both points of view justifiable - or question them all around like DBV sports director Michael Müller.
He and the Irish head coach Eddie Bolger now have their second, debatable defeat in four days of competition - the Berlin Hamsat Shadalov was eliminated from the featherweight tournament on Saturday with the same result.
However, these are not scandalous judgments.
Measured against some previous games, Tokyo has been astonishingly fair so far.
So it could be that the necessary luck was again missing on Tuesday - or simply “one or the other, clearer hit” (Müller).
Even if Apetz “thought I had done enough”.
The brave doctoral student would have been only too happy to go ahead again in order to surpass herself.
She was the first German female boxer to win a World Championship medal in Astana in 2016 with her third place;
two years later she fought for the same precious metal at both the World Cup and the European Championship.
For her taste there was “a lot of bronze”, as she once complained in a small circle.
Now she wanted to prove in Tokyo “that I can take that one step more” and had therefore suspended all other projects - from her thesis to brain stimulation in Parkinson's disease to the position of eloquent active spokeswoman in the boxing association.
With the qualification for Tokyo, however, the boxer of the SC Colonia 06 Köln has once again set a mark: So far, she has been the only German in the discipline who has been Olympic since 2012.
That should be more than a small consolation.
In addition, the DBV still has a 'last man standing' in the raffle.
Hamburg's Ammar Riad Abduljabbar was able to qualify for the quarter-finals in the heavyweight division two hours earlier with a foolhardy point win over Jose Maria Lucar Jaimes (Peru). There he will meet Muslim Gadzhimagomedov, the Russian tournament favorite, on Friday.