I deleted everything. Deleted the remote branch via the webUI, and then removed the ENTIRE repository from my local machine and re-cloned it to the same spot.
Is there any way on earth to recover that deleted branch? In looking at the web UI, there's no record of my deleting the branch, or the pull request I attempted to make with it.
If you have deleted your branch locally, remotely and it is not present when you type git reflog there is no way to use git to recover your branch.
Furthermore, due to the way git stores branches (in a single workarea, compared to SVN that stores each branch in a subdirectory) the probability of successfully recovering the branch using data-recovery tools is close to zero.