Winter Dodgeball - Week Five: It's Lonely At The Top.

Complete with a majorly blurry photo of Leah appearing to give the old school Eff You to somebody. Clearly I'm running out of pictures.

It's not that I feel like our season started off shaky. In fact, the second match we played on the first day of league play was one of the best ones we've had. But Week Two was a bit frustrating, and I think we all felt a little annoyed/discouraged after that night. So, like I said, it's not like we played poorly in the first two weeks. But in the past three weeks, we've played really well. Yeah, we lost one last week, but we simply got outplayed. It wasn't like some of our losses in the past few seasons, ones that we knew were going to bug us all the way home. It could have gone either way, and it didn't go ours. It happens. Or at least that's how I feel about it.

This week, we continued in our recent (and highly successful) trend of pulling together as a team, and it seemed we could do no wrong. (I should also mention that as much as we have gelled as a unit, there have been some outstanding last-man-on-the-court performances of late, and those people have exemplified true grit in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.) We took our first match by a fair margin, coming out on the better end of the 6-2 score. I was sweating pretty hard by the end of that one, which should be shocking to absolutely no one at this point.

It's been hard to determine if we play better when we're fresh (not tired, but also not really warmed up) or one game in (plenty warm, but possibly overtired). In our second match, we were playing the team we were tied with for first place going into the week, and who had not yet played that night. We knew what we were up against, and if we were tired from the first match, we didn't seem it. The final score ended up 5-3 in our favor, but it didn't seem that close. Maybe we were ahead the whole time? I don't quite remember the specifics. Either way, they were a really good team, and much like we were outplayed last week, we were the ones doing the outplaying this week.

I ain't even gonna front, y'all: it made for a sweet victory. So, if you check the standings here, you'll see that we are alone in that coveted top spot. But, there's still another week left, and none of it really means jack, because it's all-or-nothing in the playoffs. We're re-playing the team that we had such a good game with in the first week for our last game, and it promises to be a vengeance-filled rematch.

We'll give 'em a good run.