Season Finale

Day 3: March 4 2010

Prior to 2002, I had never pulled an all-nighter. Sleepovers at the time consisted of ten or so of us gathering at a kid's house, eating pizza, and playing video games. Brutally intense tournaments were built around whichever video game was chosen (usually either Smash Brothers or the EA Sports title that was in season).

This meant that for long periods at a time, two kids would be facing off against each other while eight other kids silently sat staring at the screen. My passive aggressiveness - "too bad my quarterback's accuracy rating isn't as high as yours" - was honed over many such showdowns. Tempers flared and a small amount of property was destroyed. One or two kids wouldn't take the game seriously and would spend their turn dicking around, which was considerably worse than kids like me who cared too much and acted like jerks when we lost. Apathetic kids brought into stark relief the fact that we had become emotionally invested in a meaningless pseudosport.

Finally, futile attempts to descramble the porn channel ("my brother taught me how! he swears this works!") and a discussion of women occurred before we collapsed into our sleeping bags. The host's parents usually let us sleep until about 11:00 am the next morning at which point they would wake us with bagels and orange juice. We would retire, smelly and exhausted, to our respective homes shortly thereafter.

2002 was the first sleepover I attended at which we succeeded in staying up until 7:00 am. The scene in the basement when the clock finally crossed 7:00 was very similar to how the NASA control room reacts after a daring mission succeeds in every space movie ever: muted, exhausted clapping and a series of hugs.

I have never pulled an all-nighter in college, but yesterday was pretty damn close.

A combination of strong coffee and inefficient study habits led me to fall asleep at 3:00. This is late, but not unusually late for a college student. However, my strategy on the night before tests is to study until I am no longer retaining material, then fall asleep, then set an alarm for 5:15 a.m. so I can wake up and finish cramming before the test. The strategy means I can squeeze in some sleep before a test, such as the one I had this morning at 10:30.

The test ended at noon and the adrenaline eventually wore off. By the mid-afternoon, I was cranky and needed a nap. Running today was going to be a challenge.

My plans to groggily tough it out and run a few miles today soon changed. I received an email from my intramural basketball team members indicating that we had enough people to play the game tonight. Since it was the night before spring break, a lot of kids had already flown out and left campus. Instead of forfeiting the game, we fielded a team and competed – though I'm being fairly liberal in my interpretation of the word "compete". A brief recap of our season:

Game 1: We played with the chemistry of a collection of overpaid superstars, except we all suck at basketball and no one gets paid. So, we were pretty much left with a team of crappy players who couldn't play defense or rebound. After trailing all game, we narrowed the deficit to nine with five minutes left before ultimately falling by twelve. I had six points.

Game 2: We played against a fraternity's intramural squad. All of them were built like Kevin Durant – our opponent's entire roster was seemingly over 6'1 and 150 pounds. After falling behind by twenty in the second half, I drain a couple of threes to pad my stat line and finish with twelve points.

Game 3: The nadir of my athletic career and an outcome which nearly sent me into retirement. The other team, again from a fraternity, only had four players. We lost by ten. To put this in perspective for non-basketball fans, it's similar to playing against someone at chess and losing, only they played with no queen or rooks. To put it in perspective for non-chess fans, it's like losing a basketball game to a team with FOUR !&#?!# players on it. I once wrote that my basketball ability was "a worse version of Royal Ivey". It turns out that's incredibly unfair to Royal Ivey. I think it's more accurate to compare me to those people at NBA games who get selected to make a free throw for a bunch of money, only if instead of merely airballing the shot the contestant somehow turned the ball over seven times and generally made James Naismith's family weep, and then his pants fall down for added humiliation.

Game 4: The March 4^th game was the season finale. We finally played solid help defense and hung in the game the entire time, but could not make a shot. The final score was 42 – 27.

It's hard to write about one's own basketball games without sounding like Matt Christopher. I remember plowing through dozens of his books back in elementary school (all of them had titles like Ice Magic or Nothing but Net). From what I recall, the books did not follow the Hollywood formula of "gritty underdog overcomes adversity and beats rival in final game".

So, in terms of my Broad Street Run Quest, I did not technically run any miles today, but I played a competitive basketball game so it counts as something. I have a whiteboard in my room, and I wrote "Did I run today?" on one side and "Broad Street Run in X Days" on the other and I keep updating it. I have ran for three straight days (not impressive yet) and the Run is in just under two months. I also wrote "Do Not Erase" and circled it so the custodial staff knows to keep it.