On my way to setting up a basic counter/7-segment display circuit, I thought I’d experiment with adjusting the slew of the inverter I was using to reset the flip-flops. With a little tweaking I was able to extend the high/low voltage rate of change to extend the response time of the reset buss. This was sufficiently slow enough to let the system pulse its way into displaying the number 9 before resetting to zero. In short, I cheated. My bad.