... but mostly me talking about baseball.
Sports probably have a basis, somehow, in chaos theory. They're unpredictable. That's why people follow them, bet on them, and watch them in bars.
On the first day of the statistics class I'm taking this semester, the professor was differentiating between probabilities that we can mathematically determine, and probabilities that are merely educated guesses. As an example, she used baseball.
"Usually, I use the Cards for this example, but it looks like they're out of it this season. The probability that the Phillies win the world series…"
Before Glory Days (in that same statistics class,) Danielle and I were discussing the coming tournament. People, strategies, who's going, and what has happened in previous years. Last year's Glory Days was awful. Games were decided by the flip. You had up-hail and down-hail points. By stacking our upwind line, and failing a thousand times before we succeeded, we had the only upwind break of the day to win the finals. (Then the weather cleared up and looked positively sunny in the obligatory picture.) I suggested that we didn't have the depth this year to do the same thing, if we even made winning this fall season tournament a goal.
Meanwhile, the stats professor publicly apologized to all the "die-hard Cardinals fans" who never gave up on the season. They had just won the National League title and would be playing the world series against Texas. (St Louis vs. Texas. This sounds oddly familiar.) They crushed Texas as we watched in the hotel on Saturday night, and last night staged a fantastic comeback to tie the series at 3s. (One of the cool similarities between ultimate and baseball is that it's (almost) never too late to make a comeback. There's no "impossible" until there's three outs. Or Texas scores 15 points. Or whatever.)
The Cardinals are down two, at bat in the bottom of the first.
So Glory Days…
We win our pool on Saturday (5 games), beating Ball State, a split Northwestern (by shutting down their handles), Miami Ohio, Central Michigan (with lots of good plays from rookies), and Truman (who also have strong Cardinals loyalty). Apologies for not remembering more. 5 games is a lot.
Sunday, we started playing at 1, which is absurdly late for a morning person like me. Our first game was against Purdue, who beat the other half of Northwestern in the quarters. I remember playing Purdue at last year's Whitesmoke, and they were significantly better this time around. We had a strong start, having named our starting line "Dumbledore's Army," and took half handily, before playing a close second half. We eventually won that game, but it was kinda sloppy.
The finals were against Indiana. They were fairly good, but only had a few key players. (Pink socks and number 99 were often strategically allocated on defensive points.) I would guess they had 11-13 players, while we had 18. That makes a difference when you have a 5 game Saturday. And, here's the being-wrong part, we won because we had depth. Apparently I'm no good at making objective predictions. ("If I'm on the starting line, we must be in a pretty sorry state.") So I will refrain from making any more predictions, especially self-denegrating ones.
We're the two-year running champions of Glory Days.
And the Cardinals won the world series.