"E was not to be deterred."

Everyone's got a sports team horror story, don't they? Usually it's the parents. Sometimes it's the coach. Ours tonight was the players themselves. And their fans. OMG, their fans.

We played for the league championship tonight. Elijah's never won a title game in basketball. We played for the title last year. If you remember, our opponent actually lost their qualifying game, but protested on the grounds that the team they lost to was playing ringers. Then they turned around and beat us in the championship BY DOING THE SAME THING! So that was kind of frustrating.

This year we played a team that we had a lot of trouble out of when we played them in the regular season. One player in particular — the smallest player on their team — had a real attitude problem. So none of us were very excited to see that this was who we were playing for the title.

Their team, the MadDogs, packed the stands with a bunch of really loud high school kids. Loud. Rude. Disrespectful. They mocked our players. They mocked our coaches. They mocked the refs. They even mocked the league representative who was there. They yelled Godzilla slurs at our Asian player. They barked when we shot free throws. Their players got two technicals. They nearly started two fights which, oddly, didn't result in technicals.

We were up by one at the half. I thought I would throw up. Some of our moms got in a shouting match with some of their fans (the kids, not their parents, who were actually pretty respectable, relatively speaking). My philosophy is to ignore that kind of behavior. People like that only get egged on by your reaction. And the last thing I wanted was some kind of altercation in the parking lot after the game.

The second half got pretty awesome. We went up by six, by eight, by ten. The further ahead we got, the uglier their crowd got. With a minute and a half left, the MadDogs down by nine, the league representative stood up and quieted the crowd and told them it all had to STOP. One of the girls yelled out something about, "Tell it to both sides then!" Which, first of all, that's precisely why I was telling our group NOT to respond to their bad behavior. And secondly, really? You're gonna yell back at the league guy? You stay classy, MadDogs.

They started fouling, as is the practice of a losing team at the end of the game. They fouled Elijah, he stepped to the foul line to shoot. One of their fangirls yelled something about him being "Will Ferrell" (a Semi-Pro reference). E was not to be deterred. He made his shot, then turned around and blew a kiss to the girl. It was the MOST AWESOME THING EVER.

I call this photo CHAMPIONS.