This Saturday, I won my third consecutive season of the Squadrons Championship League in a row. It's my last season.

I haven't sat with that thought at all, until I listened to this song from The Mountain Goats.

I used to always skip the piano solo (a literal meme in some mountain goat fan groups) and this time I started crying while listening to it thinking about this whole saga. Not sad tears, because like the music itself, I was thinking of the moments, ups and down, beautiful and dissonant, downtrodden and triumphant, scattered but cohesive. How else could I describe two years of a competitive hobby I cared a lot about (too much) in a small community?

I realized there is so much to unpack - 2 years of my life playing the game. I can't even think of how to write about other than just writing it like a list.

• Rising to a competitive level
• Leaving my team to jump to a new one with the guy I was closest with on that team
• Working our asses off to bring that new team to the top
• Getting close with teammates
• Getting aggravated with teammates
• Having one dip out completely due to a manic BPD episode
• Playing a season down a player, worrying about our friend
• Burning some bridges pulling players from other teams we were friends with that were held back by their teammates
• Working even harder to get our new teammates to be the best we can be
• Growing stronger as a team, closer as friends because of it
• A disappointing finish in the 2nd most important tournament the game saw
• Watching friends from lots of teams leave after it, watching the game die more
• We made this team so strong, why stop now? Let's keep playing
• Don't drop a single game in the next league season, garnering reputation as the undisputed best team leading up to playoffs
• Drop some games in playoffs and lose the finals
• Start getting more of a reputation because we argue against the rest of the community about proposed new "balancing" tweaks (all community run at this point)
• Some of our friends that left come back and make a team
• Incredible players, some of the best in the game and their team is probably stronger than ours
• We take on a group of players to help coach them and make a new team. They do incredible, and make it into the 2nd tier division of the league off a play-in.
• We all feel the pressure from last season to do as well as we did, but we also don't know how much more grinding we can take
• One of our teammates can't deal with the stress of the game and stuff going on in his life, drops and ghosts us
• The season is trading punches with the other two good teams
• Playoffs come, we don't think we can beat our friends' team. I'm out of town, we have a sub play. The other top teams are missing key players too for playoffs.
• In the craziest upset, we knock out both and win the season. Our first win. I'm on my honeymoon when I hear the news.
• Our tutor team comes top of their division, and makes it into the top for next season.
• The next season we combine with our friends' team because of availability with multiple people so both teams needed more bodies.
• Our team becomes the heels of the league, seen as hoarding talent and probably some jealously from other teams with how insanely stacked our roster is.
• We are crushing the regular season, but because of the perception from others in the community, some teammates put it on us that we shouldn't drop a single game.
• Shit happens, we drop a game here and there (no matches) and a split is made in the team between my team and the others.
• I'm playing the 2nd half of the season and playoffs from a hotel in Singapore.
• Finals come, and we dominate. Not a game lost in the finals, nothing is even close. it's 4am in SG when we finish. My first win.
• Due to the dust-up in earlier in the season, we part ways with the one teammate who was just too toxic.
• A player from the historically best team in the game starts reaching out, looking for good pilots to make a gimmick team. Our friend that left the team earlier comes back too.
• Basically everyone from our team joins, and we start developing strats that intentionally make the game harder for us.
• We have a rocky first round in the league, then sort our shit out and start crushing again
• End the season in a commanding first place, and almost walk through the finals where an upset team takes us to 5 games, we get it in 5.
• Today I got called "the villain" of the league in a mean-spirited way because we won with kind of a joke strat. I wouldn't want to end it any other way.

Outside of the competitive ups and downs I just listed like a grocery list, I also made lifelong friends. Halfway through this season, my teammates came from the bay, alaska, north carolina, canada and the UK and we spent days in the woods together. I'd never seen any of these people in person in my life except one, but I had spent the whole pandemic talking to these people on a daily basis. Overcoming challenges together, arguing, sticking up for each other, bonding, laughing, growing. I love these people, and it was one of the most memorable and best weekends of my life.

My relationship with Magic wasn't good. I don't regret it, but had I done it differently, I wish it had been more like my time in Squadrons. Not because I did better, but because yeah there was the spaceships and the competition, but also there was the people. I'll never forget that, never regret it.