Stole Three

Tonight, I went curling with Graeme and Karolina. The game started at 5:30 and went for about 2 hours. We played a team that was really quite good. They were able to make a lot of difficult shots, and also protected their rocks so that we had to make really hard shots to get points for ourselves. We improved our precision as the game progressed, mostly because we had to - the other team rarely left anything easy for us! Despite our efforts, they kept stealing points from us. This is a curling term - whichever team didn't get a point after an end, gets what's called 'the hammer'. This means you get to shoot the last rock, which is an advantage. Basically, you are expected to get at least one point in an end where you have the hammer. If you get a point when you don't have the hammer, you have 'stolen' a point from the team that does have the hammer. Anyway, they kept doing this to us and taking a point whenever we had the hammer. In our last end, the score was 5-3 for the other team and they had the hammer. Graeme's last shot took out their counting rock (means it was closest to the middle and counts for points), yet all the other team had to do was draw to the button with their last rock (put the rock in the middle again). The skip on the other team had done this a number of times, so we expected him to put it in like a pro. However, as the rock was moving down the ice and the other team was sweeping away, we realized their rock wasn't going to make it into the house (into the rings where the points count). We all stood there stunned as we realized we had stolen the end. Not only have we stolen the end, but we had stolen THREE points! The final score was 6-5 for us! Amazing!

Graeme felt bad about winning the game because the other team was better than us and totally deserved to beat us. They had made better shots throughout the game. However, I didn't feel quite as bad - it's not like we cheated to win. They just didn't make the shot when it was critical.

It was a fun game anyway. They were a really nice group of people actually.