sHot iN tHe dArk

A very humorous anecdote came from trivia this past Thursday. I've hesitated to tell it, because I can't quite remember all of the details of the question involved. I've decided they aren't really important to the story.

We were sucking it hard this week. Worst showing in quite some time. Going into the final question, we were in something like 7th place out of 9 teams. No chance of winning. So we decided that we were going to wager the maximum allowable 20 points on the final question, just to see if we could make anything happen.

Well, the final category was basketball. Ugh. Sports is very much the weak subject of our trivia team. And basketball is basically the sport we hold in contempt above (below?) all the others. My brother-in-law said he might know a little on the matter, so we immediately resolved to just go with whatever answer he wanted for our guess.

The question was (and here's the part where the details are sketchy) something like "rank these NBA players from least to most points scored in 2003: Carmello Anthony, Tracy McGrady, Kevin Garnett, and Paul Pierce." (I'm not even sure I have all the players right, so don't bother trying to fact check this.)

So, as my brother-in-law was working away on a legitimate attempt at an answer, I decided I'd scribble a whimsical one of my own. I decided to put the players in alphabetical order (Anthony, Garnett, McGrady, Pierce). Except that just as I was finishing, he finalized his answer, and it happened to be the same as I'd come up with. Well, that was going to blow my entire "see, here's what I'm guessing" reveal, so I decided I had to come up with something else.

Fine, I thought. I'll alphabetize them by the second letter of their last name. I wrote out "Garnett, McGrady, Pierce, Anthony" and showed it to everyone. "Here's my guess." Not that I was ever serious about going with it. We went with my brother-in-law, who with his virtually non-existent basketball knowledge had infinitely more info on the topic than the rest of us.

They read the answers... and it matched my "second letter" system. We'd have lost even if we had somehow strangely decided to go with my guess, but we all got a huge laugh out of it.

And now I know what to do next time I'm in doubt about how to arrange four items.