  Thermal pion fluctuations, in principle, can completely disorder the phase of
the quark condensate and thus restore chiral symmetry. If this happens before
the quark condensate melts, strongly-interacting matter will be in the
pseudogap state just above the chiral phase transition. The quark condensate
does not vanish locally and quarks acquire constituent masses in the pseudogap
phase, despite chiral symmetry is restored.
