Winter Dodgeball - Week Five: You Got A Lotta Heart, Big Red.

Eh, being in first place is overrated. We don't need "standings" or "statistics" to tell us that we're the greatest dodgeball team in history. We just need to believe in ourselves. Right? I mean, am I right?

If this sounds like the rhetoric of a man on a team who lost a vital match this week, then consider yourself only somewhat astute. Because I was laying it on pretty thick. So, yes, we lost one this week. And it was a hard one to lose for a number reasons. First off, we just don't like losing. Some of us take it harder than others (my despair seems to fluctuate depending on my state of mind in a given week), but I think it's safe to say that all of us would prefer to win. Yes, the exercise is nice, and it's fun to get together with friends, but over the past year, we've become accustomed to winning more than losing. So when we drop one, it stings. This week, it stung a little worse than usual.

So, like I said, personally, I seem to take some losses harder than others. Our first loss of the season was the worst beating we've taken in recent memory, and it sucked. What sucked worse was that we had, over the course of the match, cultivated a strong, fiery hatred for the team that beat us. I'm mentioning this because it happened again this week. Or at least the hatred part did. The score was much closer. The video above is from the first game of the night, and as you can see, we came out looking sharp. Things got shaky after that, and our disdain for the opposing squad grew as we traded wins back and forth.

Sure, the fact that the score was tight had us all on edge, but it was their team being populated with chumps that really got to us. Their chumpage was detected, then solidified, following a series of incidents.

During the third or fourth game, I was standing on the sideline, watching our side of the court, when I got blindsided in the face by an errant throw from our opponent's side. The girl who threw it made no move to apologize, just looked confused and started laughing. She then continued to throw at everyone's head for the rest of the match, as did the majority of her teammates. A few games later, while I was standing on the sidelines again, this super bro on their team came over to me and said "Hey, big red. We weren't laughing at you over there. Just laughing at the whole situation, you know?" I said I had no idea what he was talking about because I really didn't, but mostly because I do not want to be in the vicinity of someone who calls other human beings "big red." He adjusted his baseball cap, muttered something about sportsmanship, and walked away. I have so much more I want to say about this dude but it would expose me as the petty, petty man that I am so I will refrain.

Other than to say that after they won the 4-4 tiebreaker and clinched the match, he walked through the high-five line and said "You guys got a lotta heart." If he was kidding, it wasn't funny. If he was serious, he is one of the most supreme choads in the history of choadboys, and that's some heavy company. Bros. Dudes. We need to stop these people before they call us "chief" or "guy" again. I have a zero tolerance policy.

Losing sucks. Losing to a guy like that is proof that the system doesn't work. But we've got to keep fighting the good fight. Whatever that means.

After a twenty minute break, we prepared to inflict some serious damage on the next team we faced. And inflict we did. I was still riled up, but managed to channel enough of my anger into pelting a bunch of their dudes and ladies. I think we may have all been worked up, because we played much better than we had in our previous match, taking command early and not letting up. I managed to get hit in the face again, but this time I was actually on the court. I once again failed to receive an initial apology (though I did eventually get a "sorry for the high throw"), but was happy that at least this time it sent the spaz off the court. You can see this all in the video above, as well as me saying something like "No problem, man!" as the guy who hit me in the face walks off the court. The fun starts at around the 1:20 mark. Witness my coolness.

We eventually won by a score of 5-3, and that was some decent redemption. But it put us back to second place, going into the final week of the season. We've got one more big match, against one of our old rivals, but we've since become friends with them so it'll be fun no matter what happens. I have new teams to hate now, so I'm concentrating on those. I'm a catty bitch. Meow, etc.

Standings are here.

More videos are here.

Last week of the regular season this Monday. I need to remove the bullseye from my face.