"Don't worry, only the finalists don't get poke. We're covered for lunch."
Game 1: Sanban
Sanban was far more warmed up than Pilthy. This, at 11:30, was our first game of the day so we countered their advantage by sleeping late. Some of us got there early enough to get our legs warmed up. Some of us went to the ocean and contemplated the infinitude of waves (water, sun and wind) crashing down upon Waimanalo over forever and infinity over again.
Sanban's sneakyquick IO looks combined with and their hucks of different angles/timings than we were prepared for gave them a bit of advantage mentally early, theough they did not capitalize consistently on our mental mistakes. Our key in this game was to keep the pace up on O AND D and maintain our controlled physicality. That is, we weren't all faster than them, but we play physically, and we weren't slower than them. We also, to a man, outweigh them. Eventually they have some lapses under our consistent pressure. As they slow down a little in the second half, we put the pedal to the metal and rely on Godzilla in a change-up defense. Win, Philthy.
"Come to Kaimana, get international caps."
I'm now 2-0 against Japan with at least one bewildering but friendly bilungual foul-call discussion in each. Sweet. My brother's Big In Japan. Speaking of which, we thought Thoughts was Philthy.
We were misinformed.
Game 2: Ono
We played terribly against Ono. They might say they caused it. I would say they caused about 40% of it, and we caused the balance. That game blew for everyone.
Either way, the Sanban win secured us a quarters spot against a team to be named later. The team to be named later (So called, though I imagine they picked the name a while ago): The Southern Dandys. Headed by Kid and reaching back into ultimate today and yesterday for players.
To be clear, it is unclear what happened that night aside from Philthy Survivor Flipcup. This was good or bad. I recall recalling, however, that Lonestar carried on the tradition of "underachieving team sitting around all day suckering unsuspecting folks into playing ace-to-the-face." Which everyone on Philthy would like to thank them for. It is a dirty game, but someone has to play it.
Game 1, Quarters v Southern Dandys.
Tim 'lost' the flip to The Count for shirt color with the Count looking very pleased with himself. Also, Luke can say now he D'ed me. I threw a blade right to him in their 1-3-X look ~3 points into the game. Well, at least we didn't waste energy on defense that point.
I was reminded early in this one how much of an advantage these monkey arms are. You can teach speed, but you can't teach length. (That's what she said.) Arms also don't get shorter over the course of the tournament, no matter how well you revel. One nice rip off in this one, but it came back on a travel on the guy who threw it to me. They called a lot of travels. I suspect were traveling a lot.
"2-0 vs jerks who made us go non-pinstripes."
Game 2, Semis v Voltron.
They don't, apparently, appreciate references to their team namesake as much as we'd hoped. Or perhaps we wielded encyclopaedic cartoon knowledge while they had the goddamn Sword of Voltron.
They also didn't let us score as much as we'd hoped. Nor did we, ourselves, let ourselves score as much as I'd hoped. Really, the funny thing about ultimate is that you're just playing catch/monkey-in-the-middle with the general intention of moving down the field. If you can't play catch, you can't win. We didn't, and we didn't.
"I'll form the Head."
Well, they didn't in Finals. Ono slapped Voltron around like a delicious fish-slapping dance do. While Toonsky watched (A joker, on the sidelines...), the crowd ate poke and paradise... paradised.
Some goodbyes sadly said, and another Kaimana in the books. Until next year, when you'll find us at the Kona Brewing Co. to start it off on Friday.
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(Kaimana Preface)
(Kaimana 1)
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