Mine actually does have some duplicate content because, for example, I used quotes from the player that appeared earlier, without which my point would have made no sense.

And you're right that if I'd kept the old story online, it could trip a plagiarism wire. But I deleted it from Medium, so the trip would have to come from, say, the Wayback Machine. And I wouldn't recommend doing what I did unless you completely killed the story out of Medium (the reasons you said and others).