I think I know how sports players feel now.
Of course, I don’t play sports, but that universal feeling of being so close to victory and then having it snatched out of your hands at the last second is something I got to experience yesterday during my first History Bowl tournament of the year.
Intentionally placed on the “B” team with some other juniors to get both the A and B teams into the top eight in order to qualify for the national championship, I was expected to be the person bringing the team forward and leading us to victory despite not even being a good history player. Yeah. Funnily enough, I was captaining a history bowl team as the designated player who was supposed to get every single question that was not history (which is a fair amount).
To reach our goal, we needed to have a winning record over the five preliminary rounds, but I was nervous because two of the teams we were to play, Stuyvesant and East Brunswick, were very highly nationally ranked and were very good at history. Somehow, we managed to eke out a win over East Brunswick thanks to a few risky plays on my parts and solid performances from all my teammates, but in the game against Stuyvesant I suffered some mental damage. You see, going into the last question, we were leading by 20 points. The question was structured such that if a player got it right in the first line they would get 30 points, close to the middle of the question would be 20, and towards the end would be 10.
Of course, the other team got it for 30 points.
The despair of losing by one question, by ten points, is real, and I felt all the worse because all the way in the first quarter I had made a bad buzz on a question that a teammate knew the answer to, which would have given us a 20 point differential because we would have gotten an additional ten and the opposing team would not have gotten 10 on that question. I felt bad, but ultimately, it was one game, and our team was advancing to playoffs.
We won our first round of playoffs to put us into top 8, but in our quarterfinal round, we were once again set up to play Stuyvesant. This game was much more back and forth, with the lead changing hands multiple times, and ultimately us being sent into the last quarter while down 50 points. Consisting of eight questions worth up to 30 points each, I knew that we had to get at least five of them to win. And within the first seven questions, I got four of them, pulling the margin to a 10 point game going into the final question. The first line gets read, everybody buzzes in, including myself. This is something that I learned in class, something that I definitely know.
I accidentally blurt out the wrong answer.
And just like that it’s over, our playoff run is done. We could’ve won this game and possibly even the next, but for the second time this tournament, we lost a game because I messed up on the buzzer and lost our team a game. I think that there are a lot of lessons I can learn from this tournament (most prominently, don’t be the person to buzz on something you don’t know), but I think the main thing that I learned is that compared to what my teammates thought of me, I was far harder on myself than any of them were. All of them thought that because they hadn’t got questions or lost buzzer races, they could have swung the game even though I was probably the most direct cause of our loss. I learned a valuable lesson about forgiveness as well, because it took a few hours and our A team winning the tournament for me to be able to forgive myself for losing both games.
At nationals this year, I will be on the A team, and dear reader, you can rest assured that I am not going to lose us any games. We are going to go undefeated and win the national championship for the fourth year in a row, mark my words.