9th inning Hail Mary pass goes foul in the third period

I don't know, or really care much about sports.

Yeah, not a big surprise considering I'm female. But when you're a woman who feels most comfortable with a beer in her hand in a sports bar or pub, instead of a $12 drink among throngs of metrosexual males in the nightspot du jour, it's inevitable that the "game" is a big deal.

There's no avoiding the game. Football, baseball, basketball, college, pro, whatever. It's all about the infernal game.

Last night I went to a friend's boyfriend's hockey game whose sponsor (team, not AA) happens to be a regular haunt for us. Girls will be girls of course, therefore upon arrival we headed straight for the ice house's bar. It happens to have a large window overlooking the rink, so we grabbed a pitcher of beer and proceeded to pay close attention to every little move the team made. We wouldn't have dreamed of missing an iota of the game.

O.k, so obviously that's a complete lie.

We got drunk, traded gossip, and waited for the boys to finish. We do that at every game we go to. Got expensive Wrigley Field bleacher seats? Consider it a pricey cover charge to a beer garden that happens to have some sort of activity going on. It's kind of a silly event with grown men wearing identical, numbered outfits while running around in the grass after a little ball. Even in college when I won an all-expense paid trip to the Final Four, my friend and I got loaded and talked about the guys we had just met on Spring Break, which had been the week prior. And we also tried to come up with a way for me to get past Secret Service to meet Bubba who was there to watch Arkansas play. The real fans around us had to be seething.

Yeah, we are all about the game.

After a heartbreaking loss last night, the hockey team joined us in the bar. I went up to one of the team members to tell him I was sorry. I was sure he was devastated.

“Did you see us wablahrarara blah ra out there?" he asked.

What? I had immediately tuned out the hockey speak. It sounded like how the adults sound on Charlie Brown. Utterly unintelligible.

"I actually didn't watch a single second of the game. Sorry." He wasn't too phased by my answer.

We all kept on enjoying the evening. There continued to be talk here and there about the games of the day, but nothing too overwhelming.

As the night progressed I was ready to display even more of my boundless charm to the player I had spoken to earlier. This was a game I was very interested in. He was wearing sandals, and something didn't seem right to me.

"Is it just me or do you have an inordinate amount of toes?" I asked. It was his pinkie toes. I wasn't convinced there was just one underneath the straps of his sandals.

He laughed. No, of course he had precisely the prescribed amount of toes. 10 to be exact and he began to count them out. "One. . . two. . . three. . ."

A player's wife interrupted us. "Wait a minute. He's using his FINGERS to do this."

Flag on the play.

She was right! He was trying to throw me off. His fingers weren't in question. This guy certainly was slippery.

"Look, what do you want me to do," he asked, "paint them?" I think my game was losing its appeal for him.

"No, I want you to number them."

Game over? No, game on.