Bernie Sanders had a bad night on Super Tuesday II. He was unable to repeat his Michigan upset in the similar Rust Belt state of Ohio. Hillary Clinton won by 13 points in the Buckeye State, by 14 in North Carolina, and she blew him out in Florida by over 30 points, continuing her dominance in the South; she even eked out wins in Illinois and Missouri. According to this careful count, Clinton leads by 317 pledged delegates. Because every Democratic primary awards delegates proportionally, making it hard to run up the score without a series of blowouts, Sanders’s path to overtake Clinton looks prohibitive.

But there’s one “comeback kid” narrative left in Bernie Sanders. It will have nothing to do with re-jiggering his message, which seems immutable anyway. It’s merely a function of the primary calendar.

Sanders held his primary night speech in Phoenix, Arizona, probably because that’s the only state he might lose between now and the New York primary on April 19. Indeed, because of a quirk in the calendar, Sanders is favored to win seven of the next eight states, according to Nate Silver’s primary model, which plugs in demographic data to estimate the state-level Sanders/Clinton vote.

The states are mostly homogenous, and clustered in the West, where Sanders has done well. Six of the nine are caucuses, another Sanders strength. For example, Arizona votes next week, along with Idaho and Utah. Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington state go to the polls on March 26, a prelude to an April 5 showdown in Wisconsin, another Rust Belt state that has a fairly liberal history in primary elections. Then Wyoming votes on April 9.

Because most of these states are small, even resounding Sanders victories won’t deliver the number of delegates needed to meaningfully close the gap. But they will give the traditional media an opportunity to herald a “fundamental change” in the Democratic primary, even though that change will be largely geographic. You will surely hear pundits talking about how Clinton “can’t close the deal,” and hours of theater criticism about her stump speeches, when the truth is that we’re just hitting an air pocket of pro-Sanders states. The delegate math will remain relatively unforgiving.