LUCKILY... when I had time to think - I realized I was editing in Eclipse and that has a "local history" in teams in addition to the git "history" tab.

I got everything back - I can't believe I forgot that. One time 3 years back I accidentally rm -rf'd the wrong directory and ... 4 days gone... but I looked and looked for ideas and found it.

So yeah, if you are using Eclipse - there is a history you can fall back on.

Now back to QA and moving text around.