we had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the [dark bar]

'tis better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all. (by the by, when did we ditch "'tis" for "it's"? i feel like we could have really avoided a lot of it's its confusion if we'd stayed with the 'tis...)

but, 'tis it better to have made it to the finals and lost, than to have never made it to the finals at all?

our first game, at 1pm, was no cakewalk. the more these dudes rolled, the more i thought they were hustling us, considering they hadn't won a single game in the regular season. but we trounced them in the end.

the second game was more than a little unfair. our opponents were seriously hungover and put on a pretty good showing, but alas for them, we rocked their asses, too.

it was somewhere around 3 o'clock, and our next game wasn't until 6, so we hunted down some lunch at waterfront ale house. i had the pulled pig. they hold their own in the bbq department.

we returned to floyd with an hour to kill and did our best to re-animate. a few early afternoon beers followed by a lengthy lunch is a pretty solid recipe for lethargy.

at 6 we faced Off the Wall. these guys nearly shredded us. they beat the shit out of us in the first game, but we came back to win in the end. they were super kids, excellent sports and they hung around to support us - even giving us strategy tips - for the final game. for me, the game against OTW was far more nerve-wracking and intense than the last game. it was a real competition and i'm relatively sure they should've won the game, but we did, and so went on. we did have the pleasure of awarding them the "balls of integrity" at the awards ceremony.

at 8, we played a flock of tools called "coffee flats". the name is so lame i don't even want to know what it means. they had red jerseys with fucking numbers on. it's really bad enough to have jerseys, but numbers? it's a bar bocce league, kids, not the olympic trials. but whatever. they beat the shit out of us, so maybe i'm just bitter. i'm sure had we won i would have seen them more as a group of really committed players who were just trying to get by in this crazy, crazy world.

they were a pretty good team, and the law of averages, murphy's/sod's law, occam's razor and godwin's law dictated that we were due for a loss at the time when it would be most irritating by simply getting totally creamed by a bunch of nazis. so we end the season with an 11-1 record, which is pretty fucking awesome when you think about it. and we did get t shirts, even if we didn't get trophies.

we learned a lot about each other, about teamwork, about beating the odds, about beer, about getting too drunk on a monday night, about the hard bank left on the court, and about ourselves. in the end, even though we came in second, we won.

[music swells]
[members arrange themselves for team photo, yell "bocce"; freeze frame]
[roll credits]


manlio's hungover...