A week of brutal heat and your lawn turns brown. It looks fried. Looks dead. Your instinct is to do something: pull out the hose at sunset, grab fertilizer, lower the mower blade. These feel like solutions. They're not.
Most of that browning is dormancy, not death. Your grass is shutting down to survive the heat, which is exactly what it should do. The problem is that three specific mistakes can actually kill what dormancy doesn't. These mistakes are so common that most people don't realize they're doing them.