How is it possible to exceed the rep cap without reaching it?

Question

I was browsing my reputation audit and noticed this (which looks like a nice new feature not yet mentioned anywhere) in the footer:

rep cap was reached on 16 days
rep cap was exceeded on 22 days

Now this puzzles me. I couldn't find any definition of "reached" vs "exceeded" on meta, but at least common sense would tell me that I can not exceed the rep cap without having reached it first, so the first number should be equal to or greater than the second.

Could someone shed some light on how the above statistics are actually calculated? And, following on that, which of / how do these numbers relate to the Epic and Legendary badges?

Answer 1

Let me try to answer this clearly.

rep cap was reached via rep from upvotes *only* on 36 days  
rep cap was exceeded on 39 days

In other words, the first line will increment on a day that you receive 200 points from upvotes alone.

The second line will increment if you receive 201 (or more) reputation through any combination of upvotes and accepted answer points.

(I'm pretty sure bounties are excluded here. Not sure about points for accepting answers or getting an edit approved.)

Answer 2

See here and here for more info about that. There is no explanation about those two, but my guess is that reached is only from upvotes which reached 200, and exceeded is any day it reached 200+ including accepted answers (but not including bounties).

And I think exceeded is old or current calculation of rep-cap, and reached is probably under thinking or not yet deployed (not so sure) to badge calculations.

Maybe something like this

rep cap was reached on 16 days according to new calculations
rep cap was reached on 22 days according to original calculations

Edit: Please take a look Jeff's comment for the meanings of reached and exceeded