Turn out the lights

Alma and I traveled to Maryland over the weekend to play with Colby and Tyler in what was, barring something unexpected, our final quiz bowl tournament, 2007 TRASHionals. There have been ten TRASHionals tournament and I've played in seven of them - if that's not reason enough to hang it up, I don't know what is. (Of course, if that required you to retire, there would be a pretty wide open race for the title next year.)

We went out on a pretty high note. For the fourth time in seven years, we reached the top playoff bracket, placing second in our Saturday round-robin group with a 7-2 record. We went 3-3 in the playoff rounds, 3-4 total in the playoff bracket (as our loss in group play to the eventual winners, Craig, Mike, Joe and Anne, carried over), to finish in what was announced as seventh place but I think there's some debate over that, as the team that was announced as sixth evidently had a worse record than we did and we beat them head-to-head. We were initially announced as fifth in 2005 before it was revised up to fourth, so TRASH doesn't exactly have a history of nailing our placement. I'm sticking with sixth unless someone can show me otherwise.

I had one of my better TRASHionals on a personal note as well, so that was a good enough way to end things. I believe I was fourth in scoring, which is a personal best, and I snatched goods off both Craig and Greg in the yankee swap prize ceremony, so that was fun. I was fourth in scoring mostly on the strength of my playoff rounds, which were driven by an 11-tossup round against the Michigan alum B-squad (the Matt-Rob-Geoff-Steve group). My previous TRASHionals high was 8 (accomplished twice, but not since 2002); in this game I had seven in the second half alone. It would have been even cooler if that had been our final game; we had one more, against recurrent foes Tia and the TRASHmen (our first meeting with them was at 2001 Regionals, where we lost twice in the round robin before the miracle 10-30-10-30 finish in the championship match to beat them; including this year we've played them six times since, which is a pretty high amount, and won five of those), which we won handily in a balanced game for the whole team. It wasn't quite Ted Williams hitting a home run, but it was a good finish to my career, and I think Alma would agree.

And with that, the curtain draws closed. As I said to Alma over the weekend, I think we've pretty much hit our ceiling; until teams like the Keenans, O'Reillys, and that ilk break down or retire, we weren't going to go any higher than sneaking into the top five (as teams of mine did in 2003 and 2005), and it hardly seems worth waiting around for when none of the players on those teams shows any inclination to quit. My personal scoring isn't liable to get much better, especially since I refuse to bother with anything as lame as "studying," and anyway fourth place is pretty good. I'm undoubtedly as good as I've ever been, but that will probably be the case for ten or fifteen more years, and how long do I really need to do this?

What it boils down to is that I no longer get much satisfaction from drilling less experienced teams, and aside from doing that over and over I don't see what more there is for me to achieve. Any team I was a part of would probably need to really hit its packet to get past a hump like the Keenans, and while I think that's doable - even if we haven't beaten them since 2001 - we'd need to hit several of our packets in a row to beat several teams of that type in a playoff, and that doesn't seem likely. (Although I wonder now, idly, how my 11-tossup game would have been affected by the Keenans or O'Reillys, not that we weren't playing a pretty good team in that round.)

Even if I did enjoy playing exactly as much as I once did, the value of trips has gone way, way down. For one thing, I have to pay for this stuff out of pocket now, so thank God for small miracles like this year's tournament being in College Park so I could stay with my parents instead of having to pony up 90 bucks a night or whatever to stay in a hotel on top of 200 bucks for an airplane ticket. For another, I love Alma like crazy, but I'd much rather go on a vacation-style trip with her if I'm going to be shelling out, rather than something that feels like nothing so much as work. The only extracurricular thing we had any time to do while not playing TRASH was a trip to the mini golf course in Laurel, and that's only because I insisted on playing it; I'm sure the other three would just as happily have gone without. I think Colby found a little time to sightsee before his flight on Sunday, but Alma and I were so tired by that point that we couldn't have wandered around DC if we'd wanted to. The point is, you're expending an entire weekend on travel and playing TRASH and you really get very little chance to do anything else. Playing TRASH is fun, but it's not so fun for me that this feels justified.

So, like I wrote in my senior quote, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. I'll be forever grateful to TRASH, and quiz bowl in general, for helping to introduce me to the love of my life, but it's time for Alma and me to sever that tie. Not completely, of course, because there are people we know through quiz bowl whom we want to continue to know, but I think we're all past the age where quiz bowl has to provide our primary excuse to be social. It's time for me to grow up just that little bit more.

Alma, Tyler, Colby, Charlie and Ryan, all my other teammates from college and high school, everyone from other teams who was ever fun to interact with, and anyone else whose presence mattered - thanks for eleven years, guys, and good night. Be sure to tip your waitress.