Duluth: A Short Story

Vomit spewed out of Brandon’s mouth as he desperately tried to aim it back into the orange juice container from which it came. I tried to press myself as closely to the edge of the seat as possible. At first nobody in the suburban noticed except for me, then the smell hit everyone. It was a sickly sweet smell like over-ripe oranges in a bath of vinegar. As he was cleaning himself with a towel he said, “Well this is a great way to start off our robotics trip.”
This indeed was a great way to start our annual trip to Duluth for a FIRST robotics competition. Brandon’s brilliant idea of drinking a gallon of orange juice in the last half-hour of travel backfired when we began to descend the hill on which Duluth is built. But fortunately it
Louis. Our team has a reputation of being a solid team from a small town rivaling many teams from much, much bigger schools from the Cities. With this in mind you shouldn’t be surprised that we did pretty well in the qualifying rounds. Well enough to be picked for the end tournament. Even in the tournament we stood our ground and pushed our way through to the final match. We were up against Irondale, West Fargo, and East Duluth, truly a formidable alliance. Best two out of three match up. First round goes to them. Second round goes to us. The tiebreaker round was upon us. If we win this then we will bring home the coveted blue banner. Sam and I brought Dingo-Bob onto the field and spent too much time making sure it was in the perfect spot. “Good?” I asked. “Sure! Why not?” he replied. When we returned to the driver station there was an air of nervous energy. We did a little dance to appease the crowd when our team was announced. I tried to give a little pep talk to our ragtag band of nerds, “Is everyone ready for the game of your life?! We are going to win this and bring home a blue banner! Okay, here’s our game plan, score more points than the other team.” I don’t think this really did anything to boost our team’s ego. We stood there watching the countdown till the game started. Five, four, three, two, one, the robots took off in their preprogramed routes.
People were yelling, litter was flying, stacks eight feet tall were being capped with trashcans. Brandon and I had cleared all the totes on our side, so we looked over to see how our team members were doing. I looked over and to my surprise they had a huge stack, but it wasn’t on the scoring platform! I have no idea how they managed to create a massive stack but weren’t able to put it on the scoring platform. Whatever the reason I looked to the other side and the other team was ahead of us but only by a few points. The stack of totes already made but not on the stack was more than enough to get us ahead. Ten seconds left. DNA was ever-so-slowly pushing it towards the scoring platform. They reached it with time to spare, but as they pushed it up the slight incline there was a wobble. Then it became a sway, everybody was holding their breath. Then the unspeakable happened. It fell down. It came crashing down, knocking our other stacks down like enormous dominoes. We looked at each other. “Well, this sucks,” I think I captured the situation pretty well. We went home with a second place medal and melancholy