Big Weekend Fun

Of the exhausting sort. Here's the rundown:

I hunted, watched Q play basketball, ate meals and did dishes. Very, very little else.

Janneke's been very generous about taking charge of the kids while I walk around in the woods, pretending that there is such a thing as an adult male deer. I've seen deer - Friday afternoon, I went out to stand through the sunset (when they are most active), and two does bounced across my path. I'd have had a fine shot at either, had I thought to acquire a doe permit back in June. But no, I had to hold my fire.

I'm hunting in the Mount Anthony preserve up in Bennington. I have seen one other hunter in the woods so far, so already it's an improvement over Ragged Mountain, where I had been hunting the past few years. And the two does I saw there, plus the two I saw several weeks ago, together quadruple the number of deer I ever saw while hunting in Massachusetts. Plus, you can use an actual 20th-century weapon in VT. Not that I've had much chance to use it.

Actually, opening day I did take a crack at a buck, but I missed, and it's just as well, because I turned out to be on land that did not actually belong to the people I (and they) thought it belonged to. I was somewhat grumpily told to leave. And I did.

Saturday morning I hunted 'til 9:00, then came home to take Q up to the high school for a 3-on-3 tournament. His friend Sean is an unbelievable basketball player, and his other friend Colton is very nearly as good. And they have Q and another kid named Eli, who are find athletes but aren't born to hoop it up like those other two. Their team was "The Baconators", and their first game was at 10:15.

They won two games, against people they knew from Williamstown (I think - they blur together). 20-minute games with a continuous clock; coaches (Colton's Dad in Q's case) get one time-out per game. The Baconators looked to be cruising - Q scored a few in each of their first two games, and on the strength of the Colton-Sean Big Two, looked to be headed for the championship.

Then they ran into a team from another town, wearing Celtics uniforms.

These kids had been coached, you see. They were all four quite good players - none as good as Sean, but two (or even three) were about as good as Colton. They had outside shots, ball-handling skills, and some tactics that were very effective.

Like constant fouling. If the person driving to the basket isn't actually shooting, the only consequence of a foul in this format is that the team fouled gets the ball out at the top of the key (half-court games), so it's to one's advantage to just foul and stop anyone who starts moving netward. The fouling was too consistent, in my mind, not to have been on purpose. Their coach called out "Don't reach in" whenever they did it and were called, but the tone of it, and the kids' reaction, seemed to me to have been arranged ahead of time. As in, "I'll tell you not to foul, but keep doing it." Who knows, I can't read minds. But they were a-foulin' like mad.

And since you have to check the ball in to start a possession, another thing they were all doing was returning the ball to the Baconator player with a low bounce pass, followed immediately by a charge, putting them right in the face of the player trying to in-bound the ball. Again, too consistent not to have been coached. And a little bush-league, in my opinion.

All that was one thing. But these kids were trash-talking, too. Staring our boys in the face, making hip-hop-style "You want some of this?" gestures...They had a very bad attitude, I thought. But the last straw came as the endgame approached: Up by two, their coach called a time-out.

With one minute to go.

Clock kept running.

And they won.

Bush-league.

Q walked out of the gym with me, dejected, past the trophy table. He jerked a thumb toward them. "We're not going to win one of those," he said. He was pretty upset, as were the rest of his team. Tough moment. But they had to bounce back - More basketball yet to be played.

Double-elimination tournament, you see, so the Baconators went to the losers' bracket, where they won out handily, putting them back into a rematch with the undefeated "Celtics" team. they'd cruised through the rest of their schedule and were feeling their oats. (As I have on very good information from the mother of one of Q's friends, who stood near them as they watched the Baconators clear out the last opposition in the losers' bracket and overheard them dirisively mocking everything they could about them.) So they had a rematch - If the "Celtics" team wins, it's over; if the Baconators win, they get to play that team again, in a final game, for all the marbles.

Q didn't score a point in that game, but he became a defensive monster, sealing off his man constantly and making a number of big steals, causing a number of turnovers. It see-sawed until the end, when Colton just took over, having discovered that they just had no answer for him coming in along the baseline and laying it in. As they reached the minute mark, the Baconators suddenly had a three-point lead.

And called timeout. Game over.

Turnabout, and all that.

Setting up the final matchup, where, and frankly, I'm just too tired to make it dramatic, so I'll let you know early: The exact same thing happened. The "Celtics" looked defeated - they weren't fouling anymore like they had been, and weren't doing their bush-league inbounding anymore - their coach may have seen me somewhat exhuberantly miming their antics to anyone who would listen, and may have decided to knock it off. Who knows, though - a lot of the games leading up to this one had started getting very physical, and the ref did talk to both teams before the final game. He may have said "Clean it up, I'm going to be whistle-happy". So it came down to skill again (and height - Sean is a big boy), and the Baconators were just too much. They won, 12-8, and shouted their victory to the rafters.

It was intensely karmically satisfying.

OK, that's all I have the steam for. T's fine, Janneke's fine, Skittles is fine, I'm fine...Still deerless, but fine. I'll write more when I become a better person.

So don't hold your breath.