Proud of the Champ

All good things must end. As Alex said as he talked to Andrea during Final Jeopardy, it was not her day. These were not the ideal categories for her, but they were not terrible either. They just weren’t as good as yesterday, where she had an advantage yesterday. State Capitals and Dialects were categories so fitting for her that she was able to respond quickly.

Another facet of the game that I haven’t touched on much was buzzer speed. From my vantage point, I could see all three contestants pressing their buzzers on nearly every question. That meant that on most of these, they all knew the answers. Paige was incredible quick on the buzzer, and built an insurmountable lead. By the way, she was very sweet. We talked to her at length later. Just an extremely friendly person. We didn’t stick around to see whether her run continues, but we’ll be rooting for her.

Andrea seemed out of it by the end, but her getting Final Jeopardy ensured a 2nd place finish. We’ll take that. Total winnings: $23,800. Frankly, we didn’t even expect that much. With my injury, the surgery, recovery time, and the nerves of the entire experience, we would have been happy with second place in the first game. We even discussed that. If she could have gotten better with the buzzer, then she could have kept going. She’s that smart. She got both of her Final Jeopardys, and she knew a lot of them from the week prior when we watched shows. That’s where it matters most.

As you saw, we had a nice romantic story about our Honeymoon. I’ve mentioned before that we are serious film buffs. We met at a film festival 10 year ago. One of our favorite movies was Before Sunset, and while in Paris, decided to go from location to location. We didn’t make it to all the locations because the filmmakers are lying liars. You cannot get there in an hour and a half. Toward the end of the day, having seen enough, we decided we saw enough.

Cafe from Before Sunset. We enjoyed a nice coffee here midway through our trek.

Did I mention that we met 10 years ago? After the taping, Andrea was digging around our old stuff for mementos and found a ticket stub from that film festival. As it turned out, it was from our first date. That date was 6/16/2004. Yes, exactly 10 years to the day from Andrea’s Jeopardy win. To us, it was all about yesterday. That was the day to shine, and now the date will be cemented in our history. We have an anniversary (August 5th, 2006), but this date may seriously rival that one. We’ll just keep two anniversaries and call it a day.

Thanks for following along this crazy journey. There will be another post or two remaining, one of which will be about our experiences with the media. We’ll just say that ever since the big win, today has been absolutely nuts. We are utterly, completely exhausted. In that sense, it kind of feels good to lose. There’s something to be said for having your 15 minutes (or 60 minutes in Andrea’s case), and getting back to normalcy.

This was a different type of steep climb, but when all was said and done, it felt good to drive home and rest in our own bed, comforted by having accomplished our goal.

Back home from the most memorable trip of our lives.

Glad to be back to reality.