Yeah, I think you could take the thematic intro text in multiple ways. That makes sense, but I also feel like it makes sense to treat it like:

“Hey, you’ve been through this before. There are Masterminds, you’ve beaten them before. And now, you can feel another disturbance coming on, but you don’t know what to do. Yet.”

That the Protagonists don’t  know any ending conditions when they start hints that they haven’t been through this particular crisis before.