[FireGilbert]

I've been meaning to post this for a couple weeks now. I finally accomplished something that I thought would never happen and it made me very happy!

I am a big trivia nerd. I love Jeopardy! most of all but really like pretty much any trivia ever. About 8 years ago a met a co-worker with a similar interest and we started going to a weekly trivia night. It was only the two of us but we managed to hold our own. We even came close to winning a big prize once but I choked on a geography question getting Christmas Island and Easter Island confused.

The team grew and evolved over time with co-workers changing and eventually meeting my wife who introduced me to new trivia loving friends. We had fun and were competitive but never won. At one point we even managed to complete a full 10 game trivia season. This included a few 2nd place finishes which cumulated in a 2nd place overall season finish (you may start to see a pattern). From here we made the finals for the big overall prize and you may have guessed it we finished 2nd after I choked again getting the flags of Iceland and Norway confused.

After that the team started to drift apart with all of us moving around and becoming parents. The trivia night went from every week to a couple times a year but similar patterns were emerging. We were finishing in 2nd place every time! After about 4 of these finishes it started to become a running joke. There was even one game where we tied for first but lost on the tie breakers because we thought we were out of it and jokingly answered '69'. I was starting to accept that the meaning of my life was to always finish 2nd best at trivia.

Then it happened. It was a normal trivia night with a normal team of 6. We got off to a slow start, including another dumb mistake by me answering Luxembourg instead of the Netherlands, but managed to recover getting all the bonus questions and finishing with a score of 93/100. This was a quality score but we were confident at least one team would have beaten it. Then the quiz master came over and asked us a tie breaker question. Wow, we must be tied for first, is this finally happening? The question was "what year did Newton Heath FC change their name to Manchester United?". I told off my teammate who wanted to answer 1969 and put in an answer of 1924. I really had no clue it was just a guess. Then came the moment of truth. The other team answered 1878. The answer was 1902. We won by 2!!! Yay!!!