It is a chilly early December night, and the weather had ranged from clear to misty, rain to torrential downpour and by the joust at 8:30pm, there was no more precipitation falling on the court. As a result of the rain falling a hour before the joust, the court was slick and a hazard by itself. Despite the conditions, both teams take their sides for the first half. Galactic Decay’s bench is on the south side and Waste Mgmt settles in at the north side. The opening lineups for GD are Medic, Andre and Jeremy whereas WM is Cody, Langdon, and Suzy.

This game kicks off with Langdon winning the joust then working the passes with Cody in order to come off to a strong start. When Andre and Medic break up their plays, Suzy ends up getting the key blocks against the heavy hitters of GD. The game seems stuck in stalemate as Jeremy blocks most of the WM shots for the first few minutes. Finally, Cody and Langdon start to connect, and it’s 1-0, 2-0, 3-0 Waste Mgmt with Jake scoring two and Cody slipping one in too. WM makes a rotation and pulls out Cody/Suzy for F-off and Tony. Galactic Decay starts the rotation after play has started while they are down 0-3, and in an amazing turn of momentum, Drew G comes in at the most opportune time possible when he blocks an amazing half-court/open goal shot by the Mgmt with his bike. Dustin comes in after that and GD has the first pick along with two heavy hitters (Dustin, Dre, Drew) as their line to build a comeback.

And come back they do, with Dustin nailing 3 straight goals and tying the game at 3-3. They end up forcing WM to rotate to their solid line of Langdon, Jake the Snake, and Cody. Jake the Snake records 5 blocks in this shift and effectively holds the score at 3-3 while Cody puts in the full effort of stealing the ball, passing it, and ripping a ton of shots and finally burying one. The score is 4-3 Waste Mgmt with a little over 10 minutes to go in the first half.  At this point GD is operating off a line of Kiersten, Rowdy and Blazar while WM rotates to Wade, Mark and Cody. Blazar makes crucial blocks (3 total) in this shift while Kiersten ends up scoring an extremely clean goal in order to bring the score back to 4-4. At this point, time is down to 5 minutes and F-off has rotated in as well as Dustin. Through some chain of events, F-off manages to sneak one more goal in for WM before the half finishes, 5-4, in favor of Waste Mgmt.

After a 10 minute break the second half begins. Waste Management lines up on the south side and Galactic Decay takes the north.

For WM, the line at the joust is the very good one of Jake the Snake, Langdon, and Cody and for the deep GD, it is Medic, Jeremy and Andre. Langdon finds the open hole in this shift and smashes a goal in quickly to bring the score to 6-4 and WM leading by two goals. At this point, we begin to see a long stretch of time (til about 17 minutes remaining) where there are shifts by both teams with no goals and the score hasn’t changed for a long time, despite the blocks made by key players on both teams (Dustin, Jake the Snake and Andre are all recorded with big blocks in this period of time). For this reason, I’m not going to try and guess who shifted when, it was cold, that’s all I remember! Also, it is slippery so this long period of time entails a lot of dabs, injuries, and just difficult ball handling in the harsh environment.

But finally life comes back to the cold Decay when the line of Drew, Andre and Dustin crack open Mark (4 recorded blocks in the shift), Drew G cuts his way across to score a goal and brings the score to 5-6 with WM in the lead. The next goal is an own-goal by Mark, who had been doing well to keep the ball out until then, and the game is tied 6-6 and could be anyone’s game with less than 15 minutes to go. WM changes the line quickly to Langdon, Wade, and Suzy while Blazar, Ari and Rowdy are out for GD. In short time, Rowdy ends up cutting a goal of his own out despite two blocks by Wade and the score goes up to 7-6 for the Decay.

Could they do it? Their first lead of the game at 12:30 to go in the second half and Galactic Decay decides on putting Kiersten in for Ari while Cody, Jake the Snake and Wade are out working it. Key blocks by Blazar (1), Wade (2), and Cody (1) are part of this next shift until Cody finally scores something for his team in order to bring the score to 7-7. GD makes a full line change to Dustin, Medic, and Rowdy while WM falls on their jousting line of Langdon, Jake the Snake, and Cody.

The game starts to move into a hectic mode, time is ticking and both teams want to score another goal despite the elements. Galactic Decay pulls Rowdy out for Drew who finally breaks the stalemate and scores at the 5:30 mark of the second half. At this point, The lineup of WM had to change and looked like Farthing, Langdon, and Cody in the last few minutes while Medic, Dre and Dustin are out for GD. Medic logs two great blocks, and Jake the snake and Langdon both record one block in the frantic back and forth as time falls under 2 minutes. Despite a few amazing one-timer attempts from Cody to Farthing, WM simply cannot bring the one ring into mordor– I mean, tie the game up, and thus the game ends 8-7 to the Galactic Decay captained by Blazar.

Thus, the epic battle of the first league championship has concluded. On this cold evening, pickup was held immediately after but as both teams walked off the court, a single bench team stood above all others. That team is Galactic Decay. While Waste MGMT wonders if they let something slip through the trash receptacles, that’s it for 2012 bench league. My score keeping is almost as bad as my handwriting, but that didn’t stop me from keeping scoring or writing it all down. It also didn’t stop me from trying to tell the story of a cold night in Cal Anderson park for Seattle Bike Polo, so I hope you enjoyed it, didn’t take it too seriously, and laughed because we all love each other. I hope that everyone is looking forward to a more statistically rich league coming up with 6 new team captains and 2 more teams than the first season.

Now turn off your computer and go play polo!