Knowledge Bowl Blues - Part II

I remember walking into the tiebreaker room the same way I had walked into Arlington High School - shuddering and wilted. My teammates were vigorously trying to calm me down, as- suring me that we had beaten this team in the preliminary rounds, but nothing helped.

My head swam. My heart throbbed. I knew we were doomed.

A student from Davenport was assigned to keep score. Using a fat green marker, he printed SUDDEN DEATH MATCH: WAITSBURG vs. DAVENPORT on the room's whiteboard.

The moderator, a balding man in a gray suit, discussed the rules. Ten questions would be asked and played for in the same manner as all other Knowledge Bowl points. If the tie was not broken by the end of those questions, five more would be asked.

"Are you ready?" asked the moderator.

"No," I said in a voice that only I could hear, "but that's not stopping anybody."

The first point went to Davenport.

The scorekeeper slowly and dramatically made a tally mark under the word 'Davenport', then looked back at his team and grinned.

Davenport kept scoring. They buzzed in fast on the questions we knew and they knew the answers to ques- tions we didn't know. Only three questions went unanswered.

By the seventh question, Davenport had four points and Waitsburg had no way of catching up.

In other words, Waitsburg was out of the semifinals.

I walked out of the room crying into my purple jacket. As our team slowly trudged downstairs to the commons, Meara Baker put her hand on my shoulder. I could tell she was holding back tears of her own.

"C-can I see the rules again?" I asked.

Meara smiled wanly and handed me the blue pamphlet.

Immediately as I grabbed it, my eyes lit on a single glorious sentence:

"When advancing to the semifinal round, ties will be first resolved by the written round score."

I jumped in shock and showed the sentence to Meara, who showed it to our coach, Mr. Green. The tears immediately stopped flow- ing, replaced by pure shock.

Mr. Green went imme- diately to the event coordi- nator to plead our case. In the meantime, our team sat in the cafeteria wondering what to do. Lunch was being served, but only semifinalists were allowed to eat and we weren't sure whether we fell in that category quite yet.

Finally, it was determined that we would move on after all. We ate as much as we could within the small window of time allotted us, as the semifinal rounds had already started.

Picture our team going into the final rounds, having been excited, shocked, de- pressed, stressed, confused, and triumphant within the last hour, still feeling a little bit of all of these emotions, running on five minutes worth of lunch.

We placed ninth out of the nine teams that went on to the semifinals.

Now that I think about it, that's not too shabby after all.