Burnside is perfect. Four wins, zero losses, halfway through the regular season, and they just put up 62 points in a Elam Ending game against Rose City — a 14-point margin that doesn't feel like a contest so much as a statement. Kai Ripley's 27 points powered the Breakers through 123 possessions, and when the Elam target locked in after the third quarter, Burnside didn't flinch. Rosa Vex fought back with 24 for the Thorns, which is the kind of output that wins games on most nights. Tonight it wasn't enough, and Rose City falls to 1-and-3. The Hawthorne Hammers did something this round that the rest of the league couldn't: they made Burnside's résumé look a little softer. The Herons came into Hawthorne at 2-and-1, playoff-bound on paper, and left with a loss. Crane Fisher's 20 points kept St. Johns within striking distance — 57 to 53 in an Elam game, which means the Herons were right there — but the Hammers held on. That result matters. St. Johns falls to 2-and-2, and the cushion they had over Hawthorne and Rose City is now one game instead of two. What Round 4 reveals is that the league has a clear top and a genuinely unsettled bottom. Burnside at 4-and-0 is running away from a field that hasn't figured out how to stop them, and with the governance window open this round, the question of whether anyone bothers to push for rule changes takes on new weight. The Breakers have now won back-to-back championships in Seasons 7 and "ate the sandbox," and they are currently looking every bit as dominant as those titles suggest. Five rounds remain in the regular season. If no one closes the gap soon, the playoffs could feel like a formality for a team that has never once needed them to worry.