Yesterday, Lotus beat Stella to take Nationals in an extremely close game. The final score was 15-14. I don’t think it gets more exciting than a universe point. Maybe a universe point with about seven turnovers? I thought we absolutely had it several times, and that we were absolutely fucked several times. But we pulled it off. Kristin scored the winning point!
The final was held in the stadium where the Blue Bombers usually play. Just in case you don’t know your Canadian football geography, this puts Nationals in Winnipeg. Ah, Winnipeg. (Aside: I feel a little bad about this, but I hate Winnipeg. There, I said it. When it’s not disgustingly hot, it’s disgustingly cold. When you aren’t turning your forehead into bacon in the 30-something degree heat, the mosquitoes are flying away with your children.) Anyway, playing in a stadium was very very cool. There are way more people about than a normal final, there is crazy noise (making it very hard to hear anything on the field), the surface is turf, and there is a JumboTron, which even showed instant replays. I actually didn’t look at it, for the most part, in an attempt to stay focused. It’s too bad, on one hand, because it would have been sweet to see everything on they put up there.
The other cool thing about the Bomber’s stadium was that we got to see it the night before, completely with Blue Bombers. One of the girls on Lotus is friends with a football dude (#55, Ryan Donnelly), so we all went to the game, Saturday night after the semi.
Speaking of semi’s, we beat Zephyr from Vancouver in the semi, after they took about Quebec City. Zephyr had lost to Quebec in pool play, are we had a really rough game against them as well (in power pool play). We were down 1-4 to Quebec before pulling up our socks and out the win, 9-7. Anyway, we kind of stomped Zephyr in a very very rainy (and cold, have I mentioned that I hate Winnipeg?) semi. The final score was 15-3.
The format of the tournament was really strange this year. We had three games on the first day (in the sweltering, sweltering heat). Two games were pool play – Fusion from Winnipeg and PPF from Waterloo (scored were 14-6 and 15-7, respectively) and one was the first game against a four team power pool. This was Stella, the team that we played in the final, in another really tight game – Lotus took that one 11-10 in, you got it, another universe point.
This left just two games on Friday. Even more strange, we didn’t start until 3:15 that day. Wisely, our captains had us get to the fields for noon, and ran us through a light throwing practice, which really helped us getting ready for the two late games. The first one was Storm from Montreal, who we have had several close games with this year. We started off strong and they kind of rolled over for us. Final score was 11-3. (note: when I put “kind of”, I hadn’t looked up the score yet. They most definitely rolled over for us). As I mentioned previously, the next game was Quebec, and this went far less smoothly, but in the end, a W is a W.
Last night was a lot of fun, celebrating the big win. I ducked out early, after we finished celebrating at the fields and headed back to a hotel for a beer. My aunt Bunny and uncle Herb picked me up, and we headed to my uncle Jim’s house. They all came to the stadium to watch the game, which was great. So I hung out with those guys for a bit and had dinner, plus it was my cousin’s seventh birthday. After a couple of hours of fun with the relatives, they were nice enough to drop me back to rejoin my team as they finished off dinner at Earls. The one redeeming feature of Winnipeg is that my relatively live there. Yes, the only one. ;)
After a little more hotel drinking, we headed out, to various bars whose names I do not remember. It was a lot of fun. I think I got about 3 hours of sleep (which was actually more than some of my teammates) before getting up to catch a 6:30 am flight home again.
I really am very happy to have finally won another Nationals. My first was in 2001 in my rookie season. Not to be confused with my Rookie season(s). ;) After trying to hard just to get back in other final, how sweet it is to come home with a gold metal. Yeah Lotus!
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