Week 2 of the Playoffs
We felt ready and relaxed. We knew we could beat the number three seed and had a feeling that they had no idea what they were getting themselves into. Word on the court this week was that they were talking about us like we were an easy mark on their road to further dominance.
We saw our opponent (Boccelism) and they exuded overconfidence from the get-go. Not only did we think that we could win, we were very excited to see that their best player wasn't even there.
We took a quick 4-0 lead and our opponent (the number three seed) seemed scared.
Then the controversy!
With a number of balls already in play, Gladrags rolled. His ball just barely hit another ball before hitting the back wall. But a team member of The Notorious BRF (Notorious might not be so victorious today, but we'll see) snatched Dave's ball from the action mistakenly. What to do? The team captain of Boccelism decided to let Gladrags roll again because things were looking good for his team. How was he to know that Gladrags, given another chance, would roll a sublime roll?
At the end of the set, Team Captain Boccelism thought that maybe we should just redo the whole thing since our ball was closer and it didn't quite work out as well as he had hoped. I agreed at first but then wasn't sure. Another member of Boccelism insisted that it was our point and that we should just move on. If there had been a problem from the beginning of the mistake, we should have just restarted the frame from that point.
This discussion went on for at least five minutes.
Finally, it was decided that the point was ours and it was 5-0, us.
Then it was 5-1 and then 5-2.
I felt the tide turning.
Sure enough, Boccelism put up a fourspot on us on the way to a 7-5 victory. Yikes.
I was implored by members of the Coffee Flats Terrors to buy my team a round of shots but I was still convinced that we were going to win. We had blown a 5-0 lead in the first game of last week's eventual victory so why not again?
In Game 2, Reason to Believe and The Balltrap took a commanding 3-0 lead for us. Then Gettin' Hungry and I completely blew their socks off with a fourspot. Our team had rolled a total of 8 balls in Game 2 and we had a 7-0 victory!
You could really sense the fear in Boccelism at that point.
I decided to keep the same teams from Game 2. Reason to Believe and The Balltrap took a quick 2-0 lead and it seemed like we were on our way to a huge upset (not as huge as if The Terrors had ended up losing to ODIN) but still it would have been the number 18 seed taking down the number three seed. Oh glorious victory!
But then the tide turned. We had some bad rolls. Boccelism showed us why they were 7-1 in the regular season and we succumbed to the onslaught. The final score of the third game was 7-3.
It was a tough loss but at least we had put ourselves in a postion to win and just couldn't close the deal.
But we will be back and we will be better. There will be some changes in the structure of the team - more on that later. We will make sure to not let our mistakes be so fatal to us. All we have to do is remember - let's not hit the back wall!!!
Gladrags and I headed to Grimaldi's to bring back some pizza to console us all and to watch the Terrors march on to today's final day of play.
The Balltrap and I made up, yet once again, from our unkind words during play. We both said we would be more laidback and relaxed. We're getting there. I wonder if there are any psychologists that specialize in bocce group therapy?
In the meantime, it was fun.
We could have done better but I'll take the 5-7 record and be happy in the knowledge that we go into next season stronger then we entered this one. We will be a more seasoned squad and ready to conquer.
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6 comments:
We did our best and put up a good fight against the eventual champions. Winning the middle game 7-0 showed the world that we are contenders, even if we didn't pull it out in the end.
It was a fun season and we all can be proud of ourselves.
Yeah that was total BS to try and go back after he had already offered to let us roll again. I had no idea that was what all the discussion was about. Him having buyers remorse on letting us roll again... extremely lame. I agree everyone else on that team was cool, except him. By the way they ended up winnning the tournament. Just goes to show anything can happen tournament time. That could have very easily been us.
I just remembered another annoying thing about Boccelism: they picked green (which would naturally be our color), then kept switching balls for each other in the middle of play because there was one green ball that was heavier than the others or something. You can't do that! But we were relaxed and loose enough to not care, and didn't question it. We won the moral victory that day because we were not tools.
jim,
i love you. didn't even notice that. it is that kind of brilliant observation that should lead you to take captain chores from me.
or at least, co-captain?
oh yeah, i can't fault the captain too much. he was just trying to gain an advantage for his squad. kudos to the champs.
i noticed that too about the switching of the balls. is it illegal?
DMR you are sometimes too judicious for your own good. there is no way that shaved head boccelism was justified in asking for a reroll of the entire game because we were set to win a point. it was purely poor sportsmanship to do so as as captain of his him he should have known better. is he even the captain?
either the game should have been restarted right when the incident happened, or the ball rerolled. the court is unstable, there was no way of knowing now little or much the ball would have rolled back.
to be an indian giver because your team is at a disadvantage is really lame.
despite all our ups and downs as a team this year, i'm pretty content that we nearly took out the eventual champions.
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