Week Nine: The Scoreboard Broke and So Did Dennis

The board went at 9:58 p.m., with four minutes and eleven seconds on the clock and the score, as best anyone can establish, at 44–43.

From that point the game was scored by a man named Owen on the back of a receipt, and by the opposing captain in his phone, and the two records do not agree. Owen has us at 51. The phone has us at 50. The phone also has a basket at approximately the eleven-minute mark that four of our players insist did not happen and that Owen's receipt does not contain.

The referee, a nineteen-year-old named Kyle who is paid forty dollars a night and is doing his best in a situation nobody trained him for, declared the phone authoritative on the grounds that it was a phone. This is not a rule. There is no rule. I have read the league handbook, which is four pages and covers the parking lot in more detail than it covers scoring disputes.

What happened next was that eleven grown men, average age thirty-four, several of them fathers, stood in a gym at 10:20 at night and argued about a receipt. Dennis said a thing to Kyle that Dennis should not have said. Dennis has since apologized to Kyle by text, and Kyle replied “all good man,” which is more grace than Dennis deserved and roughly nineteen times more grace than any of us would have shown at nineteen.

We have filed. The league will not care. The league has never cared. There is a woman named Deb who runs four divisions out of a single email address and she will read our filing, and she will write back three words, and the three words will be correct.

We play Thursday.

He takes eleven three-pointers a night. He is a career thirty-one percent shooter from that distance in this gym and he knows the number because I have told him the number.

He also, and this is why he plays, dives for a loose ball roughly once a game onto a floor that was mopped in April, at an age where that carries genuine risk to a person with a mortgage.

I have played with Dennis for six years. He is the reason our team is bad and he is the reason our team still exists, because he is the one who books the court, chases the fees, and sends the reminder at 4 p.m. on Tuesday. Every team has a Dennis and every team should shut up about their Dennis.

The game ends at 10:40. The knee says nothing until roughly 9:30 the following morning, at which point it says everything at once, on the stairs.

This did not happen at twenty-eight. Nobody warns you. There is no announcement.