Completely bombed a live coding round and got hired at that same company six months later through a referral

Blanked on a problem I'd solved a dozen times before, asked to restart, still didn't finish clean. Assumed I'd never hear from them again. A former coworker referred me into a different team there half a year later and the recruiter never even mentioned it. One bad round is apparently a much smaller data point to a company than it feels like to you in the moment.