There are paths with up steps and down steps, ignoring the height constraint. For , reflect the prefix of a bad path through its first visit to height , swapping its up and down steps. The resulting path has up steps and down steps, hence final height two. Its first visit to height one identifies the inverse reflection, so this is a bijection. There are bad paths. Subtracting gives
This count connects a global nonnegative-height requirement to an unrestricted binomial coefficient. The case is separately the unique empty path.

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