The finals were somewhat of a headache for me. Towards the end of the season AG has had trouble finding a 4th player. We even had to play a crucial game 3v4 and fortunately we won. With about 30 minutes to game time, the only people that were in irc and could play were me and yogic. Fuman was on a dial-up connection and it would take a miracle for me, yogic and hpb fuman to beat GQ 3v4. Def then joined the private AG irc channel and said he broke his arm and couldn't play. I was mildly annoyed but deep down I wasn't surprised. This season has been filled with too much drama and a turn of events like this would not have been out of the ordinary. Then def said that he is just kidding and that he is ok. Punisher and Rich both showed up and said that they were available to play. Now we had 5 lpbs and HPB Fuman. Things were looking up.

GQ has liked the Major League kteams server and we tended to like XTC. Punisher would be playing and he can't stand XTC. I was on the XTC server and noticed that my ping was going from 40 to 60 to 90 to 70 to 50 to 80 to 40 again. I didn't like this. I also knew that Punisher wouldn't want to play at XTC. Yogic pings 28 to Major and I thought it would be a good idea to play there. Pun would be happy, GQ would probably also be happy, def and I would be lagged more than usual but we could still play well enough to win.

GQ agreed on the server. Then there is was a discussion about the maps. I had generated random numbers for the map order. I told GQ about them earlier in the week. One GQ player in particular was upset because he thought the map order favored us. I was kind of miffed at this and said if u want to repick we could do that. I expected them to want to repick before the match time. One GQ player was asking "well can't we repick now?" About this time Punisher started saying "come on man I have to leave. I might not be able to play all the games." This made me feel great. The other team is annoyed at the map order. My teammate wants me to try to hurry things along. I got very upset and told the complaining player to pick any map order he wanted and we would play that. After some more arguing and listening to my teammates complain that they wanted to start ASAP, the original map order was played: dm6, dm3, e3m7, dm2, and e1m2.

DM6 started off very close. The lead kept going back and forth. I noticed that one of our players was using some FFA tactics and not doing enough camping. AG tried for quite some time to secure the RA, but things weren't working out. I was doing ok in the MH room and with 10 minutes to go I was leading in the frags by about 10-15. The problem was the next 4 people in the frag list were from GQ. I decided to have Yogic play the MH room and move myself to red armor. Yogic then started to rack up the frags, killing Anti over and over, making Anti act like THE VOZ. Def got a few RA's in a row and also started to increase his score dramatically. By gaining control of the RA, GQ's people had to rush around the level trying to take it back. This enabled punisher to run around the level and kill weakened opponents. While he didn't rack up the most frags, pun did have the highest efficiency. We started to get a lead and it steadily increased until about the last minute when GQ took the ra back. We ended up winning the game 369-299.

After the 1st game, def wanted me to have the teams switch servers. I knew if I asked GQ, all hell would break loose. GQ would be upset. Punisher would be upset. It would be another headache that I didn't need at the time. Def then said that he didn't want to play Quad on dm3. I don't blame def. He is used to playing with 40 ping and had to contend with ping that fluctuated from 80 to 100. I know I was struggling to play with 70. If you are used to playing at a certain ping and then are forced to play at a higher ping, you just feel like you are playing in slow motion. At least that is how I feel. Def decided to play YA, I would play RA and yogic would play ra/eyes. Pun would run quad and smash anything that got in his way. GQ got the 1st rl, but soon we managed to get control of the RA, YA, and pun began his quad-aided 1 man crime wave. We had a nice lead until the 5 minute mark. I left the ra to help at pent and GQ had 4 people waiting to thwart my plans at the window. Unfortunately for me, these 4 poeple had rl's. GQ killed quite a few of the AG's and took the pent. They didn't however seem to get control of any areas. Soon Yogic was spawn fragging at the eyes position, pouncing on anyone silly enough to go through the ra tele. AG then got the rest of the pents, and from time to time briefly lost control of the RA and YA. Punisher would then quickly clear out the areas with quad. Pun finished with an impressive 69 frags and 87% efficiency.

The next map up was e3m7. I was going to play rl/pent, pun was to play ra, def and yogic were going to lock down the castle. Unfortunately Punisher didn't know where the ra was. He wasn't at all familiar with the map as he hadn't played it in a avery long time. GQ|Xoque spawned at the back rl, got quad and pent and cleared the castle. Def got the castle rl and quad but Xoque took him out before he could run away. Despite GQ's stellar start, soon AG had complete control of the board. There were a few comical moments in the game. I died at the back rl and spammed "get the pent! get the pent!" Punisher then replied "I would if I knew where the damn thing was." Then pun was at the castle rl when yogic was telling him to get the ya at ya. Yog kept pointing at it and eventually had to type "Get the damn thing!" Despite not knowing the map, pun put in a very solid performance scoring 40 frags. The star of the map would be def. Not only did he get 72 frags and finish with a stellar 78% efficiency, he spent some of the match alt-tabbed selecting a choice blend of music to listen to for the remainder of the game. Feeling the rhythms of central and south america, def felt the need to entertain the spectators. First he jumped across the lava backwards at the rl/ya/mh area. Then he spent 1 minute doing the lambada. If you have never seen def do the forbidden dance, beg him for his demo. AG wins e3m7 244-100 and the championship match 3-0.