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Sometimes this is said, and then someone goes and does it in practice anyway. Usually that means they redefined "it". The problem statement was simplified or too strict, and it turns out that something that the actual thing we needed in practice *was* possible.

You can't solve an NP problem in polynomial time, in theory or in practice, but maybe you turned around and solved a different problem, usually by replacing the "correct" answer, which required an NP-complex solution, with a good enough answer, which you could get with a P-complex heuristic.