Grammar and Phrase Meaning – Decoding ‘Get Going That’

grammarmeaning-in-contextphrase-meaning

From THE THREE-DAY BLOW by ERNEST HEMINGWAY:

"I wonder if Cards will ever win a pennant?"

"Not in our lifetime," Bill said.

"Gee, they'd go crazy," Nick said.

"Do you remember when they got going that once before they had the train wreck?"

What does "got going that" mean here? If it's "got that" then it's clear to me, but when I search "got going" the meaning doesn't seem fit here.

Best Answer

"Get going that" means nothing. You are actually looking at two separate structures:

  1. The phrasal verb to get going
  2. The phrase that once

Get going, from wiktionary, means

  1. (intransitive or transitive) To begin or commence.
    We'd better get this project going. If we don't get going on it soon, we won't finish in time.

And once is a variant of one time, with that as a determiner.

So:

when they got going that once

means

the one [specific] time when they started [implied: ...winning a lot of games]

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