We played way above/at/way below expectations this weekend in finishing 2nd at the Colorado Cup. Team highlights were a 15-7 spanking of Doublewide and yet another one point victory over Sub-Zero in the de facto semifinal, and lowlights were two losses to Bravo and a two-point win over Sack Lunch and a two-point loss to Kaos after we had clinched our finals berth.
It seems ludicrous and highly inconsistent to claim that we were short-handed by having only 18 or 19 players, but we were missing five guys who probably expect to play a bunch of O points, and as a result we had a very tight O rotation. (I believe that the D also had some sort of rotation, as I think I recognized a few of the guys going in and out at various times, but don't quote me on that.) I suspect that my team will always have either too many or too few players.
I had one of my 10* best Callahans this weekend, too. It was 10-10 in a game to 12 against Sub-Zero, we had just turned it over in their end zone, and I was covering some tall, skinny kid. After a few swing passes, they had it on their goal line on the backhand side, and my guy comes running in at a high count for the dump, but I uncharacteristically play good defense on him, and the turnover is pretty much a done deal by the time the pass is thrown, but I'm close to enough to slide/trip/dive to catch it for the goal.
After a turnover in the Doublewide game, they were in a spread stack and so my man and I were near the sideline. "He's three times your age," one of them quipped. I corrected him by holding up two fingers. To verify, I asked him his age, and he was indeed half of my 40 years. Kids. I'm much more fixated on ages this year than I was last year. It seems much more remarkable in ultimate than in other sports for a person to be able to say "I was playing before you were born." Heck, I was playing wiffeball when I was 5, but it would be really strange if I tried to invoke that if I was playing some 34 year old.
I commented while hobbling to the cars that it has been a long time since I felt satisfied with a second-place finish. This, despite the O never really having a great game and having some pretty crappy stretches, and the D having its own struggles. But we played well enough to make the finals, the endzone O looked nice a few times, no one got seriously hurt (ignoring the one pass in the Sub-Zero game that sent two of our guys off the field in unrelated incidents), and we had plenty of training opportunities. So, ok.
* - Positions 2-10 are currently blank, unless you count that one I had at practice that one time.
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I'm north of 45 now, have been playing since 1980 and thus find myself muttering about "playing before you were born" re. an ever-growing percentage of my opponents (and teammates). While I'm limited to league play now, the fact that, notwithstanding old legs and deteriorating physical capabiities, we can still be competitive is a testament to what a great game Ultimate is. There are a lot of different ways to defeat or be defeated by -- your opponent.
While I agree with you that "before you were born" thing has more meaning in Ulty than baseball or golf, the guy that amazes me is Gordie Howe. In 1979-80, he played all 80 games for the NHL's Hartford Whalers at 51 years old, and still scored 15 goals. It probably pissed him off that his son Mark, also on the tema, outscored him that year.
http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php3?pid=00002378
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