So yesterday I advertised my Spelling Bee that was today. This was purely for the content. But before the actual Spelling Bee, a little bit of history.

I'm a Spelling nerd. I didn't study to be one, I was just a natural. I've made every Spelling Bee team (I emphasize team because of COVID) and basically just skipped every Friday the Spelling Bee was on. I've already shared a Spelling Bee anecdote months ago (and I'm not gonna find it lol, too lazy for that) about me misspelling president (comment if you know how I misspelled it) and thus, we dropped to third. Three way ties for first are surprisingly common. One happened this year in the 3/4 Division, but my school sadly got third. In third grade, I was disappointed in my loss, so much so that my mom had to try and comfort me for 10 minutes in the car. Fourth grade was weird. It was the start of COVID, but teams are made in January, when COVID wasn't a thing. We had practice for two months, but then it got cancelled because COVID was a rising threat. There was no Spelling Bee for that year. 5th Grade had no Spelling Bee period, but 6th Grade saw the return of my dominance. I made the team, did very well in practice, and ended up missing 0 words in the Spelling Bee. But because our country is goofy and makes it a team thing, we ended up in third. But nothing might ever compare to this year.

Firstly, we left at 8 AM, because its a 30-minute ride. I arrived, saw one of my teammates, then walked over to a terribly printed sign. It said it was a recycle bin, and at the end tried to say No garbage please, but the person making was on that stuff, so it said "NO ! Garbage Please" which defeated the whole point of the rest of the sign. Weird. I walked around awkwardly for another 10 minutes, and then the 8th Grade teammates pulled up. For some reason, they all went in the same car, so we ended up with 5/6 people there. All we were waiting for was the coach and the coach's son. Despite the name I gave him, he is really smart. He's in IM-1 (Algebra 1) and he has really good grades. Like me, he's also made the Spelling team every single year, which is how we're good friends. I'm going to categorize them as their names should be private. It was me, 72, 73, 81, 82, and 83. We all lined up. In Spelling, there is one person who is always out for one round, and it rotates one chair back every time. One round is 5 words. We had 3 rounds. Or that was how it was supposed to be.

I started in the third chair, which might've been a mistake looking back. The first round started, and we came out guns blazing. We were the only team to have everyone get all 5 words right. We ended with a clean 25 points. Second round, we get 24 points. 82 misses initiative because he didn't fully erase the word, and caused an outrage among our teams. Third round, I'm subbed out. This is where the magic show happens.

83 misses two words that I easily could've gotten. I was spelling them in my head during this time and getting them all right. For example, 83 missed threshold by spelling threshhold. It was literally thresh-old, which was the way it was taught in practice. Meanwhile, another had been creeping up on us before Round 3 started. I'm going to call them Team 6, again for privacy reasons. At the end of it all, we were tied 72 to 72. Let the overtime commence.

I was back in which I had been so eagerly waiting for. Me in the biggest moment never fails! The first word was relatively easy, but the second word was niche. The problem with this, is that the people pronouncing the words are some old heads with nothing better to do. So, they said it as "nitch". I had been taught to say it as "nee_sh), so this threw me off. I spelled nitch, and when I got it wrong, I as in silent outrage. But it was only the second word, and we had time. The third word both teams got 5. Or so we thought. Apparently, Team 6 got 4, instead of 5, which was said at conveniently the best time, because it was announced right before the last word. We were down one point, and needed a miracle to happen. The fifth word was announced, and the time ended. Our team had a strategy where we put a thumbs up if we go it right and a thumbs down if we missed the word. We looked at others, and saw a sliver of hope. The following dialogue left us speechless. "Team 1?" "5" "Team 6?" silence occurred, waiting for the suspense. The proctor announced the number. "4".

You. Can. Not. Script. This.

We had sent it to sudden death. This meant we took words not in the list and had us spell it out. The first word was inscription. I was a dummy and spelt in enscription, which at the time made sense to me. If enscript was a computer program, it had to base the word off of enscription, right? Well I was wrong. And 81 also got it wrong. Our score for the word was 3. And Team 6's proctor took a deep breath, and shattered my dreams with one number.

"4".

They had won by one point. If it was win by 2, I'm sure we would've came back, but who knows, I'm just some random kid on the Internet with nothing else to do. I won't be the one to change to rules if it does happen. Anyways, we won 2nd, went to In-N-Out, had lunch, and went back to school for a mundane time (outside of me flexing my ribbon.)