The fastest route from A to B isn’t always a straight line.
There’s a special kind of curve that can get a ball from one point to another faster than in a straight line across the shortest distance.
It’s called a Brachistochrone curve.
It works because of gravity and friction and the shape of balls and all sorts of other juju that we don’t fully understand.
It won’t help you win many races, but it works quite well as an analogy. Sometimes it seems like we’re heading way off-course when we might actually be taking a shortcut.
That’s just how the Universe fits together.
How the math on that works, I guess we’ll never know.